Managed IT services are widely used by the most sophisticated organisations across the globe. Recent reports show that over 90% of the Fortune 500 have multiple outsourcing contracts to managed service providers, with a value of over $190 billion. This includes managed IT services such cloud services, infrastructure, networks, security, backup, applications and much more. How can organisations at any scale adopt the same strategy and benefit from managed IT services?

Let’s step back and take a very basic look at DHCP. In fact, let’s look at the analogy of assigning a street address to your house. Usually, this is done by the local 911 dispatch office, or some other central authority. They typically use either a survey map or a latitude, longitude pair to locate you, before they assign your house numbers from a pool of available addresses, compatible with other addresses in the area.

Two factor authentication (2FA) increases your account security further than just using a username and password. In addition to a password (the first factor), you need another factor to access your account. A great example to demonstrate this is when you withdraw money from an ATM. To access your bank account you need both your physical bank card and to know your PIN number. These are the two factors you need to withdraw money = 2 factor authentication!

In the last several years, we have witnessed the creation of many technologies, starting with the cloud and going further to machine learning, artificial intelligence, IoT, big data, robotics, automation and much more. The more the tech evolves, the more organizations thrive to adopt these technologies seeking digital transformation and disrupting industries along their journey, all for the benefit of better serving their consumers.

June 14th, 2021: Canonical and Google Cloud today announce Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, a new Ubuntu offering available to all Google Cloud users. Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud allows instant access to security patching covering thousands of open source applications for up to 10 years and critical compliance features essential to running workloads in regulated environments. Google Cloud has long partnered with Canonical to offer innovative developer solutions, from desktop to Kubernetes and AI/ML.

ECS Anywhere allows you to use Amazon Web Services’ container service outside of the AWS cloud, and Canonical is proud to be a launch partner for this service. Using Ubuntu as the base OS for your ECS clusters on-prem or elsewhere will allow you to benefit from Ubuntu’s world-leading hardware support, professional services, and vast ecosystem, in turn allowing your ECS clusters to run with optimal performance everywhere you need it.

In this post we’ll explore the concepts of data lake, data hub and data lab. There are many opinions and interpretations of these concepts, and they are broadly comparable. In fact, many might say they’re synonymous and we’re just splitting hairs. But let’s look again carefully. We can discern some subtle trends in the way people are doing things, and find distinctions in these expressions.

Ubuntu 21.04 is the latest release of Ubuntu and comes at the mid-point between the most recent Long Term Supported (LTS) release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and the forthcoming 22.04 LTS release due in April 2022. This provides a good opportunity to take stock of some of the latest security features delivered in this release, on the road to 22.04 LTS. Ubuntu 21.04 brings with it a vast amount of improvements and features across a wide variety of packages.

It’s so easy these days to set-up your own WiFi network. You order a router online, plug it into the electrical socket, define a password and you’re good to go. WiFi is fast, reliable and easy to use. But if you want to cover a wider area or connect hundreds of small devices it quickly becomes inefficient and expensive. Is the only way to go to your local mobile network operator and sign a contract? No! Thanks to open source technology, you can build your own LTE or 5G network.

Together we have reached the end. Two partners, two allies, two distributions that supported millions of innovators have reached their end-of-life (EOL). April will be remembered as the month where ROS Kinetic and Ubuntu Xenial reached EOL. ROS Kinetic is one of the most used, widely deployed and extensively contributed ROS distributions (1st with 1233 repos in ros/rosdistro). Released in 2016, it supported newer related components, notably Gazebo 7 and OpenCV 3, and this month has reached its end.