At the end of last year Canonical announced that Ubuntu Pro, our expanded security maintenance and compliance subscription, is now available for data centers and desktops as a public beta. This week, Ubuntu Pro entered general availability, giving Ubuntu users access to extra hardening and security patching. If you’re a developer using Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet or Python 2, you’ll want to read on.

Ubuntu Pro, Canonical’s comprehensive subscription for secure open source and compliance, is now generally available. Ubuntu Pro, released in beta in October last year, helps teams get timely CVE patches, harden their systems at scale and remain compliant with regimes such as FedRAMP, HIPAA and PCI-DSS. The subscription expands Canonical’s ten-year security coverage and optional technical support to an additional 23,000 packages beyond the main operating system.

The automotive industry is facing one of its biggest revolutions since the advent of automation. In this post, we will go through the Industry 4.0 aspects and how OEMs can turn these challenges into opportunities. To put it simply, the first Industrial Revolution relied on steam power, the second one on electricity and the third one on computers. What about the fourth Industrial Revolution everyone is talking about? I would describe it as a data-driven revolution.

While AI seems to be the topic of the moment, especially in the tech industry, the need to make it happen in a reliable way is becoming more obvious. MLOps, as a practice, finds itself in a place where it needs to keep growing and remain relevant in view of the latest trends. Solutions like ChatGPT or MidJourney dominated internet chatter last year, but the main question is…What do we foresee in the MLOps space this year and where is the community of MLOps practitioners focusing their energy?

Ubuntu 18.04 ‘Bionic Beaver’ is reaching End of Standard Support this April, also known sometimes as End Of Life (EOL). This distribution of Ubuntu was installed by millions of users and powers up thousands of devices. From kiosks and appliances to IoT devices and robots, 18.04 helped many companies deploy innovations to the world. As with all other Ubuntu LTS releases that reach their end of standard support, Bionic Beaver will transition to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM).

The flexibility of public cloud infrastructure allows for little to no upfront expense, and is great when starting a venture or testing an idea. But once a dataset grows and becomes predictable, it can become a significant base cost, compounded further by additional costs depending on how you are consuming that data.

Over the last couple of decades, a lot has changed in terms of how companies are running their infrastructure. The days of dedicated physical servers are long gone, and there are a variety of options for making the most out of your hosts, regardless of whether you’re running them on-prem or in the cloud. Virtualization paved the way for scalability, standardization and cost optimisation. Containerization brought new efficiencies.

Cloud optimisation enables organisations to significantly lower their cloud spending while ensuring the desired performance and necessary compliance. It’s a process that every business should adopt when choosing cloud infrastructure as a foundation for their applications. It’s been proven that applying cloud optimisation best practices leads to a total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction of two-thirds under certain circumstances. But let’s step back for a second.

It’s a new year, and an especially great time to reflect on the security of your robots. After all, those interested in breaching it are probably doing the same. In previous articles, we discussed ROS security by detailing practical steps for securing your robots on Ubuntu and the challenges the community faces. In this blog post, I’ll give you some strategies, tips and open-source tools you can integrate into your development process today to ramp up the security of your project.

In a previous post, I explained how we made our Ubuntu image 15 times smaller by chiselling a specific slice of Ubuntu for.NET developers. In this blog, I will provide step-by-step instructions on customising your chiselled Ubuntu base images for any use case. I don’t believe in a perfect container base image anymore.