Canonical Yaks about Ubuntu 16.10

Canonical is out with its second major milestone operating system release with today’s debut of Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak. The new Linux milestone provides several incremental updates for server users.

Of key note is the general availability of the Juju 2.0 deployment and software orchestration system. Juju first appeared back in 2011 with the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot release.

With Juju 2.0, Canonical has worked to make commands in Juju more consistent and logical. Juju 2.0 is also logically organized a bit different than before with the concepts of controllers and models.

“Part of this is to do with the way Juju organizes itself — now multiple models (environments) can be driven from one controller (state-server),” Canonical explains in its Juju 2.0 documentation. “This means that for a given cloud you only need one controller, but [it] can drive several models. “

Another big change in Juju 2.0 from its 1.x predecessor is the use and integration of Canonical’s LXD container hypervisor. According to Canonical, the extensive use of LXD in Juju 2.0 makes “local” models leaner and faster and also brings benefits to placing containers within models.

Container and MaaS Support Enhanced in Yakkety Yak

Ubuntu 16.10 ships with multiple technologies that can help to enable different types of containers, including LXD 2.4 for machine containers, Snapd 2.16 for application containers and Docker 1.12 for process containers.

Ubuntu 16.10 also marks the debut of MaaS 2.0, which is Canonical Metal-as-a-Service technology. MaaS 2.0 provides IPAM (IP Address Management) capabilities as well as the ability to do bare-metal provisioning of Ubuntu and CentOS Linux and also Microsoft Windows hosts.

“MAAS enables a physical data center to feel like a cloud, with on-demand availability of machines with custom images through a web or REST API,” Canonical stated.

Ubuntu 16.10 Server also benefits from networking package updates that include updated OpenVswitch (OVS) and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) packages.

Unlike the Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus LTS release that became generally available on April 21, Ubuntu 16.10 is identified by Canonical as being a standard release. A standard release is support for only nine months, whereas Ubuntu 16.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) and will be supported for five years.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist