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Canonical

New GPU and GUI features announced for WSL at Build

Microsoft Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference, is taking place virtually May 19-20. Ubuntu will be featured throughout the event, in announcements of new WSL features, demos of cloud-native development on Microsoft Azure, and by presenters using Ubuntu desktop with native Microsoft applications like Teams, Code, and Edge. In an address by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the company announced new features coming to WSL 2.

Experimental feature: progressive releases

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” This is a famous quote attributed to the Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke. It is also quite applicable to software development: “No code survives contact with the user.” In mission-critical environments, staggered deployments of software are a crucial part of controlled updates, designed to ensure maximum stability of production applications and services.

OpenStack Ussuri available on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 20.04 LTS

Canonical today announced the general availability of OpenStack Ussuri on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The most notable enhancements of today's OpenStack upstream release are stabilisation efforts around the Open Virtual Networking (OVN) driver and the Masakari project which allow organisations to run highly available workloads on the top of an open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform. Full commercial support for OpenStack Ussuri in Canonical's Charmed OpenStack distribution will come with the OpenStack Charms 20.05 release on May 20th.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is certified for the Raspberry Pi

The release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was April 23, 2020. On the same day, Canonical added full support for Ubuntu Server 20.04 on all of the Raspberry Pis that we certify. Users can flash 20.04 to their Raspberry Pi knowing Canonical guarantees it will ‘just work’ and can make the most out of all of the new features added with 20.04. You can do this from our download page, or from the Official Raspberry Pi Imager tool.

The New Ubuntu Server Guide

With the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) the Ubuntu Server Guide has received a major set of updates and has moved to a new location on the Ubuntu website. The new location makes it much easier to read and contribute improvements. There is a link on the bottom of each page that points directly to the corresponding Discourse page which contains the source for each page of the Ubuntu Server Guide.

Updatable Ubuntu Server Live Installer

The Ubuntu Server Live Installer, introduced with the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), provides a live Ubuntu Server environment along with a streamlined server installation experience. Building on guided installs for LVM, RAID, encrypted disks and advanced networking configuration (VLANs and bonds) the installer can refresh itself to the latest version during the live session.

Top 3 benefits of Apache Cassandra and how to use it

It’s no secret that organisations have a love-hate relationship with data. Decision making can be unguided and market insights can be lost when organisations collect too little data. On the other hand, with large and active datasets, where requests number in the hundreds of thousands, maintaining database performance is increasingly difficult. One open source application, Apache Cassandra, enables organisations to process large volumes of fast moving data in a reliable and scalable way.

Managed OpenStack cheaper than self-managed?

Outsourcing OpenStack operations can significantly accelerate the OpenStack deployment process. Although most organisations are successful with the initial roll-out of the cloud, many struggle to operate it effectively post-deployment. Under certain circumstances, a fully managed OpenStack can also be a cheaper option than the self-managed one. We have recently published a webinar in which we demonstrated a detailed cost analysis of both options.