Continuing its efforts to court enterprise customers, Canonical Ltd. has added a distribution of the Kubernetes container manager to its product offering in public clouds and private infrastructure. The company, which distributes a commercial version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, said it’s focusing on operational simplicity combined with robust security, elasticity and compatibility with the Kubernetes standard.

Kubernetes is open source container cluster manager that was originally developed by by Google for managing its own application containers across clusters of hosts. It uses a loosely coupled architecture that enables developers to deploy applications quickly and scale them on the fly. Google donated Kubernetes to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in the summer of 2015.

Canonical said its distribution enables customers to operate and scale enterprise Kubernetes clusters on demand on both public and private cloud. Support will be available on Canonical’s distribution on Google Compute Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and on-premise with OpenStack, VMware Inc. virtualization and bare metal provisioned by the company MAAS (Metal as a Service). Canonical will support deployments on both private and public infrastructures. The company claims that 65 percent of large-scale OpenStack deployments are built on Ubuntu.

Canonical has been working to expand Ubuntu beyond its roots as a popular desktop Linux distribution into the enterprise. In April, the company added support services aimed at long-term deployments, following close on the heels of a partnership with Microsoft.

Canonical said its Kubernetes distribution adds operational and support tooling but stressed that it is otherwise fully compliant with the standard. Rather than create its own platform-as-a-service, the company will offer a standard Kubernetes base as a platform for extension by other vendors. The company said that the ability to target the standard Kubernetes APIs with consistent behavior across multiple clouds and private infrastructure “makes this distribution ideal for corporate workgroups in a hybrid cloud environment.”

Canonical-developed “charms” encode best practices for cluster management, elastic scaling and platform upgrades independent of the underlying cloud. By developing the operational code together with the application code in the open source Kubernetes repository, developers can track Kubernetes requirements and collaborate on automation, the company said. Canonical’s Kubernetes also comes integrated with the open-source Prometheus for monitoring, Ceph for storage and an integrated Elastic stack for visualization.

The distribution is supported on any Ubuntu machine covered by the company’s Ubuntu Advantage support program. Additional packages include support for Kubernetes as a standalone offering, or combined with Canonical’s OpenStack. Canonical also offer a fully managed Kubernetes, which it will deploy, operate and then transfer to customers on request.

This product is in public beta, the final GA will coincide with the release of the Juju 2.0 management and modeling tool.

Image by Nestor Galina via Flickr CC