Snappy Ubuntu Core Arrives for Amazon Web Services

It looks like the Ubuntu team made a very good decision in creating the new, stripped down and fast performing “snappy” version of Ubuntu Core. This minimalist take on Ubuntu is targeted at those doing cloud deployments, and is already integrated with Microsoft's Azure cloud platform and Google Cloud. Snappy is optimized for Docker deployments and platform-as-a-service environments, as I covered here.

The team at Canonical has even called Snappy the “biggest revolution in Ubuntu since we launched our mobile initiative.” Now, The Ubuntu team has announced that snappy Ubuntu Core is available on the 800-pound gorilla on the cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's apparently designed for extremely fast deployment on Amazon EC2.

You can watch a video about Snappy Core here, and according to Canonical:

"Ubuntu Core is the new 'snappy' rendition of the popular cloud OS, with a very lean and secure base image that features transactional updates for both system and applications. Snappy Ubuntu is perfect for container-oriented deployments using technologies like Docker. Customers can try a beta version of snappy Ubuntu Core today on Amazon EC2 by launching an instance of Ubuntu Core. Here are the instructions."

Robbie Williamson, VP Cloud Engineering at Canonical said: “The snappy Ubuntu Core approach is faster, more reliable, and provides stronger security guarantees for apps and users. We’re excited to make Ubuntu Core with snappy packages available on Amazon EC2 and Amazon EC2 Container Service.  Ubuntu Core on Amazon EC2 Container Service is a fast way to dive into containers on Ubuntu at scale.”

The beta of Ubuntu Core will run throughout the current Ubuntu development cycle.

According to another missive from Canonical:

"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."

And, as Computerworld noted:

"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 Core version of Ubuntu is especially designed to make common tasks easy for cloud administrators. It's a lock to gain a lot of users on AWS, the Azure platform and Google's cloud platform. Also, more than 50 percent of OpenStack deployments are built on Ubuntu, and lots of these deployments will build on Snappy Core.