James Nunns
on 20 September 2018
Kubernetes: the tech industry has become pretty well versed in talking about what has become one of the biggest technology trends in the past few years with most claiming some involvement in it.
Canonical also does Kubernetes, but not in a ‘me too!’ kind of way. The Charmed Distribution of Kubernetes (CDK) is pure upstream Kubernetes tested across the widest range of clouds — from public clouds to private data centres, from bare metal to virtualised infrastructure.
What makes Canonical different is that it works in close partnership with Google, the pioneers of Kubernetes (also known as K8s), and we offer a pure version that runs everywhere Ubuntu is…which is basically everywhere, on every cloud. Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system underpins most container initiatives, including over 70% of Docker containers in use today. Moreover, Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes service is built on Ubuntu and in partnership with Google, Canonical released its own distribution of Kubernetes. Canonical is also an active partner in all the leading container initiatives, including Docker, and is a member of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation.
Recently, we also announced that customers would now be able to see the benefits of Ubuntu optimisation by Amazon and Canonical on Amazon’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) thanks to Ubuntu worker nodes hosting high performance Docker containers in AWS. The real advantage being that highly sought after portability for enterprise container workloads that are developed on Ubuntu workstations and operated on private infrastructure with Canonical’s distribution of upstream Kubernetes.
Although these may just sound like a boastful claim, there’s more substance to it. With tangible benefits coming from Canonical and Ubuntu’s close ties with K8s and Containers and all the major cloud players.
For example, the development with AWS, which was built on minimal Ubuntu images, means that there is up to 30% faster kernel boot speeds, shaving small numbers down even further when expanded exponentially this makes a real difference to costs and performance.
It’s worth driving home that Ubuntu is the most widely used container host OS – especially for deployments of upstream K8s. For users, with Ubuntu as their EKS container host, this means that they have the exact same runtime dynamics on AWS as on other Ubuntu-based K8s deployments in private infrastructure.
Expanding that picture further, CDK on VMware, bare metal, or OpenStack also has the same Canonical-supported kernels, libraries, tools, and container runtime binaries. Again, this results in improved CI/CD efficiency and test pipelines that span workstations, private and public cloud infrastructure. Making that multi-cloud world we operate in a little easier.
