The Latest Ubuntu Images Arrive on Google Cloud Platform

Canonical, working with Google, has announced that it is launching the public beta of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 12.04 LTS and 14.10 on Google Cloud Platform. "Starting today, it is possible to select optimized, up to date, fully secure and consistent Ubuntu images on Google Cloud Platform," Canonical's post noted, adding that "Canonical continually maintains, tests and updates certified Ubuntu images, making the latest versions available on Google Cloud Platform within minutes of them being officially released."

Ubuntu has been shown to be an increasingly popular platform for use in the cloud and as the basis for cloud deployments, and making it available on Google's cloud platform should attract many users. 

For all Ubuntu LTS versions, Canonical provides maintenance and security updates for five years, which will appeal to the enterprise users that Canonical is increasingly focused on.

“The lack of official Ubuntu images had been holding us back in migrating portions of our infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform,” says Sebastian Stadil, founder of the leading open source cloud management platform, Scalr. “We are pleased to see Ubuntu technologies be made available to all our enterprise customers.” 

Federico Lucifredi, Certified Public Cloud product manager said, in a statement: “As more enterprises join start-ups in turning to public cloud environments to run mission critical and scale-out workloads, Google Cloud Platform has quickly established itself as one of the world’s leading contenders for their business. Bringing Ubuntu to Google Cloud Platform is a logical first step in what we believe will be a great collaboration, benefitting developers and enterprises looking for an easy to use, reliable OS for their cloud deployments.”

Ubuntu actually has a remarkable track record as a guest operating system of choice on all major public clouds, with around 70 percent of workloads running on Ubuntu, according to Canonical. Ubuntu is also the basis for many OpenStack deployments, according to data from the OpenStack Foundation.

Check in on the Google Cloud Platform site for more information.