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BERLIN — In a keynote at the OpenStack Summit here, Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical Inc and Ubuntu, detailed the progress made by his Linux distribution in the cloud and announced new extended support.
The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Long Term Support) debuted back on April 26, providing new server and cloud capabilities. LTS releases have always come with five years of support, but during his keynote Shuttleworth announced that 18.04 would include support that is available for up to 10 years.
“I’m delighted to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for a full 10 years,” Shuttleworth said. “In part because of the very long time horizons in some industries like financial services and telecommunications, but also from IOT where manufacturing lines, for example, are being deployed that will be in production for at least a decade.”
OpenStack
The long-term, stable support for the OpenStack cloud is something Shuttleworth has been committed to for several years. In April 2014, the OpenStack Icehouse release came out, and it is still being supported by Canonical.
“The OpenStack community is an amazing community and it attracts amazing technology, but that won’t be meaningful if it doesn’t deliver for everyday businesses,” Shuttleworth said. “We actually manage more OpenStack clouds for more different industries and more different architectures than any other company.”
Shuttleworth said that when Icehouse was released, he committed to supporting it for five years, because long-term support matters.
“What matters isn’t day two; what matters is day 1,500,” Shuttleworth said. “Living with OpenStack, scaling it, upgrading it, growing it, that is important to master to really get the value for your business.”
IBM Red Hat
Shuttleworth also provided some color about his views on the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat by IBM, which was announced on Oct. 28.
“I wasn’t surprised to see Red Hat sell,” Shuttleworth said. “But I was surprised at the amount of debt IBM took on to close the deal.”
He added he would be worried for IBM except for the fact that the public cloud is a huge opportunity.
“I guess it makes sense if you think of IBM being able to steer a large amount of on-prem RHEL workloads to the cloud, then that deal might make sense,” he said.
