Snappy Ubuntu Arrives for Google Cloud, Optimizes Docker Use
As we've reported before, more than half of OpenStack deployments are being built on Ubuntu, according to the OpenStack Foundation, which backs the claim up with survey results. Ubuntu's popularity with the cloud crowd is not lost on Canonical, which recently launched a new “snappy” version of Ubuntu Core. This minimalist take on Ubuntu can especially serve Docker deployments and platform-as-a-service environments.
Now, in a smart move, Google has adopted the Snappy core for use with Google Cloud. It's a streamlined version of the Canonical Ubuntu Linux distribution tuned to run Docker and other containers along with Google Cloud. It provides the essential components for running Linux task in the cloud, but removes some of the bulk of the full version of Ubuntu.
"Ubuntu Core is a new rendition of Ubuntu for the cloud with transactional updates. Ubuntu Core is a minimal server image with the same libraries as today’s Ubuntu, but applications are provided through a simpler mechanism. The snappy approach is faster, more reliable, and lets us provide stronger security guarantees for apps and users — that’s why we call them 'snappy' applications."
"Snappy apps and Ubuntu Core itself can be upgraded atomically and rolled back if needed — a bulletproof approach to systems management that is perfect for container deployments. It’s called transactional or image-based systems management, and we’re delighted to make it available on every Ubuntu certified cloud."
The team at Canonical is even going so far as to call Snappy the “biggest revolution in Ubuntu since we launched our mobile initiative.”
As Computerworld notes:
"The Google Compute Engine (GCE) joins Microsoft Azure in supporting the fresh distribution [of Snappy]...Google has been an ardent supporter of Docker and container-based virtualization itself...In June, the company released as open source its software for managing containers, called Kubernetes. The design of Ubuntu Core is similar to another Linux distribution, CoreOS, first released a year ago."
Indeed, we've covered Kubernetes and Google's focus on it in depth. Some very big contributors are committed to the Kubernetes project, including IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and SaltStack.
The Snappy version of Ubuntu is especially designed to make common tasks easy for cloud administrators. It's a shoe-in to gain a lot of users on both the Azure platform and Google's cloud platform.