Canonical to Focus on Private OpenStack Clouds, with Support

This week was filled with soundbytes and announcements from OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, but there wasn't a whole lot of coverage of Canonical's announcements regarding OpenStack on Linux, OpenStack training, compatibility testing and more. Mark Shuttleworth gave a keyote speech at the summit and noted that Canonical is adding private cloud hosting to its business model. Through a new private cloud offering called Your Cloud, 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." The offering includes 24/7 support from OpenStack experts.

As noted on ZDNet: 

"Canonical will build and operate your cloud. You can host it on the hardware of your choice in either your own datacenter or through your service provider. There are no up-front costs....Based on the reactions at OpenStack Summit floor, Canonical will have no problem finding customers for this new service."

Additionally, Canonical is offering Ubuntu OpenStack training through a program called Jumpstart, and Canonical staff will provide hardware (an Orange Box cluster delivered to a customer's premises for two weeks of use) and consulting services.

Canonical officials at the OpenStack Summit were adamant that at many smaller companies, deploying and supporting an OpenStack cloud is too tall an order to carry out without help. The emphasis they placed on small businesses was noticeable, and different from the enterprise focus that companies like Red Hat have when it comes to OpenStack.  Nevertheless, it's clear that Canonical is going to compete directly with Red Hat and other companies in facilitating and supporting private OpenStack clouds.

The competition should be fierce, and Canonical may benefit from the fact that it runs an OpenStack Interoperability Lab. It features some really heavy-hitting tech partners including Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Inktank/Ceph, Intel, Juniper and VMware. The lab focuses on integration testing and more.