Canonical, Ubuntu Have Big Stakes in the OpenStack Race

Back in November, I covered the interesting results from the OpenStack Foundation's User Survey, which appeared right after Canonical announced that it would meld OpenStack with Cloud Foundry within Ubuntu, and Red Hat made a series of announcements furthering its commitment to the cloud platform. The survey revealed more news regarding Ubuntu, including the fact that within the OpenStack ecosystem, users go with Ubuntu 55 percent of the time as their host operating system, a surprising statistic that Matt Asay also discussed in a post. 

In a blog post, Mark Shuttleworth has confirmed that "OpenStack has emerged as the consensus forum for open source private cloud software," and acknowledges that "Canonical and Ubuntu play an interesting role in OpenStack."

Shuttleworth notes:

"It’s a point of pride for us that you can get an OpenStack cloud built on Ubuntu from just about every participant in the OpenStack ecosystem – Dell, HP, Mirantis, and many more – we think the healthiest approach is for us to ensure that people have great choices when it comes to their cloud solution...We publish stable, maintained archives of each OpenStack release for the LTS releases of Ubuntu. That means you can ALWAYS deploy the latest version of OpenStack on the current LTS of Ubuntu, and there is a clear upgrade path as new versions of both OpenStack and Ubuntu are released....We ourselves invest very heavily in testing, continuous integration, and interoperability, with the largest OpenStack interop program (OIL) that gives us the ability to speak with confidence about what combinations of vendor offerings will actually work, and in many cases, how they will perform together for different applications."

 Canonical announced the opening of the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) late last year, and it features some really heavy-hitting tech partners including Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Inktank/Ceph, Intel, Juniper and VMware. The lab will focus on integration testing and more. 

As we've noted, Red Hat is also strategizing in big ways around OpenStack, but many observers are noting that Canonical is getting more and more traction in the OpenStack space. And, for now, Ubuntu is still the most popular operating system for running the fast-growing cloud platform.