Canonical's OpenStack Offerings to Change the Company's Direction

Canonical is drawing a lot of attention after unveiling its own Ubuntu OpenStack distribution, and part of the reason is that Ubuntu is already the most popular platform of all for building OpenStack deployments on. That fact was reported in the OpenStack Foundation's survey findings and has been bolstered elsewhere.

As I noted all the way back in May, Canonical is increasingly going to be competing with players like Red Hat and Mirantis in the OpenStack arena.  The Canonical Distribution for Ubuntu OpenStack is billed as offering "the widest range of commercially supported vendor options for storage, software-defined networking and hypervisor from Canonical and its OpenStack partners."

The OpenStack Foundation has reported that its survey results show OpenStack deployments being built on Ubuntu more than half of the time. Canonical is wise to build on that success with its own distribution, but questions still loom about whether the company has the experience supporting enterprise users to craft a well-rounded OpenStack business.

The company does have some advantages. As The VAR Guy notes: 

"The company is emphasizing the automation and simplified deployment features of its OpenStack distribution, which are the fruit of its investment in homegrown cloud orchestration and management tools, such as Juju, which it has been developing for years, and the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab, another longstanding initiative."

"Packaging [offerings] together allows the company to make its integrated OpenStack offering official, while also, perhaps, playing a more direct role in deciding just how organizations deploy OpenStack on Ubuntu."

Canonical has already added private cloud hosting to its business model. Through a private cloud offering called BootStack, for $15 per day per host, "Ubuntu offers all the software infrastructure, tools, and services you need to have your own cloud at your fingertips."

That offering includes 24/7 support from OpenStack experts. Additionally, Canonical is offering Ubuntu OpenStack training through a program called Jumpstart.

Clearly, Mark Shuttleworth and the gang foresee big growth for open cloud computing. With its OpenStack distribution, training and services, Canonical's line of products has never been so diversified. Let's see if the company can keep all of the balls in the air as enterprises turn to it to build out their cloud infrastructure.