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Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Services Helps Users Build (and Support) Private Clouds

While it may be a completely philosophical debate whether the universe is turtles all the way down, it's a lot less existential to imagine that the internet is clouds all the way up. In April, Canonical previewed its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (affectionately known as UEC), a system designed to simplify the creation, optimization, and management of cloud environments for private organizations. The interface and functionality of UEC is similar to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, uses in-house hardware running Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04, and is powered by Eucalyptus Systems cloud computing tools.

Today Canonical officially launched the UEC service, including generalized tech support, consultancy and deployment services. Although UEC support is a joint offering from Eucalyptus Systems and Canonical, the Canonical team will act as the primary contact point in order to simplify and streamline support transactions.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is geared to organizations that would prefer to keep their cloud deployments (and servers) on-site. Canonical also offers a public cloud package, Ubuntu on Amazon EC2. For those who keep their deployments in-house, however, one of the most reassuring aspects of UEC (and indeed, many open source software offerings) is that support services -- and the type of support purchased -- are optional, and won't lock an organization in to a contract that potentially won't always suit its changing business needs.

Those wishing to try UEC on their Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04 machines are encouraged to take a look at the documentation on getting Eucalyptus up and running on both front-end and node boxes.

• open source
• ubuntu
• linux
• cloud computing
• server
• Canonical
• Eucalyptus
• UEC

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