Public cloud
The most cost-effective way to go public
Why the public cloud?
Escalating complexity and increasing management costs have caused many organisations to look to beyond their own walls in recent years, for a more cost-effective, flexible way to deliver application services. Now it’s here.
The public cloud allows end users to create services on systems that are hosted and managed outside their firewalls. Where it differs from traditional managed services is that the instances are all virtualised and can be created, updated and terminated using an API. Customers are typically billed by the hour for the resources they consume.
Whether to deliver your entire compute requirements or simply to provide some ad hoc additional capacity, the flexibility and the 'pay as you go' charging model provided by a public cloud can make it the ideal option for businesses constrained by their own enterprise infrastructure.
Talk to us about your cloud plans today
Whatever stage your cloud plans are at right now, the cloud experts at Canonical can help you take the next steps.
The public cloud loves Ubuntu
Ubuntu is ubiquitous in the public cloud, both as underlying infrastructure and as a guest operating system available on Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud, HP Public Cloud and Windows Azure among others. With unique cost-saving technologies, scalable business models and a range of support services to choose from, Ubuntu provides everything you need to take advantage of the boost in productivity the cloud can deliver.
We’ve been working with public cloud providers for several years now, creating tools such as cloud-init, to ease the process of bringing up new instances on a public cloud. In this case, the tool proved so successful that it was later adopted by other Linux distributions and by Amazon itself.
The most welcome guest in the cloud
With Ubuntu Cloud Guest, you can install Ubuntu Server instances on any of the leading public clouds. Ubuntu is now the most heavily used guest OS on both Amazon AWS and Rackspace, with official Ubuntu Cloud Guests now on offer from the following providers:
- Amazon Web Services (EC2)
- Rackspace Cloud
- HP Cloud
- Windows Azure
You can also install it on private clouds built on Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure, the OpenStack-based IAAS solution in Ubuntu Server, giving you the freedom to burst private cloud workloads to your public cloud, when workloads demand.
The infrastructure behind the public cloud
If you’re a public cloud provider, our Ubuntu Cloud Guest programme can help you give your users the best possible experience when running Ubuntu as guests on your cloud.
If you’re considering building a public cloud, the OpenStack-based Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure could be your most cost-effective option.