Leading Linux Players Rapidly Shift Their Emphasis to the Cloud

This week, not only is Red Hat touting its success at getting a number of notable enterprises to choose its Linux platform and OpenStack offering for deployments, but Canonical is rolling out Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and highlighting it as the best way to build out an OpenStack cloud environment. These efforts underscore that leading Linux platforms and cloud computing are going to be joined at the hip going forward, and the players behind them will need to offer top-notch support and compatibility. .

Among the attractions to Red Hat's Enterprise Linux platform, it serves as a good basis for an OpenStack cloud deployment and also comes with top-notch support. These are the same things Canonical is emphasizing with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, being released this week. Canonical notes that the platform brings "a new level of reliability, performance and interoperability to cloud and scale out environments with support and maintenance for five years."

Back in 2011, I made the point that support will differentiate cloud platform providers, and we're seeing that play out now. 

“Ubuntu is the primary platform for cloud – public, private or hybrid. In this release, our third LTS with deep roots in cloud, we raise the bar for efficiency and orchestration at scale. That’s why businesses are adopting Ubuntu as they move to the cloud computing era,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, in a statement.

Canonical has also released these testimonials to successful OpenStack deployments being built on Ubuntu:

“Time Warner Cable (TWC) is running Ubuntu OpenStack and partnering with Canonical as part of our strategy to improve infrastructure utilisation and accelerate service innovation, deployment, and delivery.  We’re looking forward to seeing the latest 14.04 LTS release,” says Matt Haines, VP at Time Warner Cable.

“Using Ubuntu OpenStack is enabling NEC to maximise margins on cloud  services, minimise cloud deployment risks and speed up time to market. The arrival of 14.04 LTS supporting OpenStack Icehouse version promises a great release for continuing to reap benefits of cloud,” comments Shou Watanabe, Executive Specialist at NEC.

Additionally, Canonical is highlighting its OpenStack Interop Lab (OIL), which covers partners such as Cisco, Brocade, Dell, EMC, Emulex, Fusion-io, Mellanox Technologies, Open Compute, HP, IBM, Inktank/Ceph, Intel, Juniper, LSi, SeaMicro and VMware. The lab runs over 3,000 OpenStack tests each week, using different combinations of Ubuntu, OpenStack and third party technologies.

Many of the companies partnered with Canonical on the Interop Lab are also big contributors to OpenStack, and many have their own deployments based on the platform. 

Over the next five years, look for Red Hat and Canonical to solidify their positions in cloud computing, focused on OpenStack. As they do that, the positioning of the companies and their places in the Linux ecosystem will shift as well.