Canonical is bringing technical support, management tools, and legal cover to enterprises running Ubuntu Server in the public cloud. Those capabilities, and more, apparently arrive with the new Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest service. It’s designed to complement Ubuntu Advantage, the program which already supports Ubuntu running as the IaaS layer.
Cloud Guest brings service providers and businesses Landscape, Canonical’s own system management and monitoring tool, 24 by 7 technical support, and access to the company’s knowledge base. The goal is to provide extra reassurance for those running Ubuntu Server in flexible, scalable, affordable public cloud environments as enterprises begin to run them alongside traditional data center models, according to the press release.
Right now, Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest only supports Amazon EC2-compatible public clouds, like GoGrid, RackSpace, and, ahem, Amazon EC2. But given that EC2 is, for better or worse, the de facto cloud standard, that’s not nearly as limiting as it may sound.
As a refresher, our last update on Ubuntu’s cloud strategy was when Canonical announced that Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud would be built with OpenStack support at the foundation from now on, leaving Eucalyptus Systems more or less in the lurch.
Needless to say, we’ll be watching Canonical closely for more updates, so stay tuned.
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