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Ubuntu 21.10: Release the party

There ain’t no party like an Ubuntu release party. You might think that you are a party animal, but have you seen an Impish Indri? Some time ago, it was common for the Ubuntu LoCos (local communities) to host and run ‘release parties’, meet-ups, and get-togethers where members of the wider community come together to talk about all things Ubuntu. This idea has somewhat disappeared. But what’s stopping it from coming back?

KVM hypervisor: a beginners' guide

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is the leading open source virtualisation technology for Linux. It installs natively on all Linux distributions and turns underlying physical servers into hypervisors so that they can host multiple, isolated virtual machines (VMs). KVM comes with no licenses, type-1 hypervisor capabilities and a variety of performance extensions which makes it an ideal candidate for virtualisation and cloud infrastructure implementation.

How Kubernetes 1.22 addresses industry needs

On August 4th 2021, Kubernetes (K8s) upstream announced the general availability of Kubernetes 1.22, the latest version of the most popular container orchestration platform. At Canonical, we actively track upstream releases to ensure our Kubernetes distributions align with the latest innovations that developers and businesses need for their cloud native use cases.

Where configuration management falls short: model-driven OpenStack

Have you ever installed OpenStack from scratch? I know, it sounds geeky, unnecessary and maybe even overcomplicated … It is after all 2021, OpenStack is mature, there are hundreds of OpenStack distributions available out there, configuration management tools are all the way around and installing OpenStack from scratch almost sounds like compiling the Linux kernel or using make scripts to install software on Ubuntu.

Cybersecurity with Ubuntu

The cybersecurity state of affairs can be described as too complex today. There is an enormous number of threats endangering sensitive data for the average IT team to cope with. Threats ranging from exposure of physical assets stored in an office, to “social engineering” attacks resulting in unauthorized access, or even threats that exploit obscure software vulnerabilities.

Model-driven observability: Taming alert storms

In the first post of this series, we covered the general idea and benefits of model-driven observability with Juju. In the second post, we dived into the Juju topology and its benefits with respect to entity stability and metrics continuity. In this post, we discuss how the Juju topology enables grouping and management of alerts, helps prevent alert storms, and how that relates with SRE practices.

Cloud PaaS through the lens of open source - opinion

Open source software, as the name suggests, is developed in the open. The software can be freely inspected by anyone, and can be freely patched as required to suit the security requirements of the organisation running it. Any publicly identified security issues are centrally triaged and tracked.