Canonical ships Utopic Unicorn

Canonical has just shipped Utopic Unicorn, the latest version of its Ubuntu Server operating system. And while it isn’t quite the Promised Land of operating systems that the name suggests (there are no unicorns either), it does come with support for Docker containers, the latest iteration of OpenStack, and a bunch of other refreshed features aimed at hyperscale deployments.

The IT world is crazy about containers these days, and Ubuntu 14.10 is happy to follow the crowd with support for Docker v1.2, as well as LXC containers, embedded inside. With previous editions of Ubuntu Server, containers could only be created by sysadmins with root access. But now LXC containers are getting a new user-level controller, which means users can do so too. This means that developers will be able to launch as many containers as they wish to test different tiers of code in their apps.

Ubuntu Server 14.10 also comes with Juno update of OpenStack, which itself was released just last week. Key components like Cinder, Ceilometer, Glance, Heat, Horizon, Nova and Swift have all been refreshed, while the new OpenStack setup includes options for installing Hadoop and Apache Spark on virtual machines running atop OpenStack. Juno also offers more granular policy controls for object storage as well as support for network function virtualization (NFV), which was introduced to satisfy the telecommunications industry.

Also on the management front, Ubuntu’s Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) tool to help run Ubuntu on bare metal servers has been updated to version 1.7. Now, it’s not only capable of deploying Ubuntu Server instances, but also instances of CentOS 6.X, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3, and Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2.

Pivotal Lab’s Cloud Foundry software has also been integrated into Ubuntu Server 14.10. While its still just a beta feature, users can deploy and scale Cloud Foundry on Ubuntu using its orchestration tool Juju. Juju Charms define applications as services, and the Cloud Foundry charm allows users to deploy a Cloud Foundry PaaS on cloud infrastructure or on bare-metal servers using MAAS.

Admittedly Ubuntu 14.10 has a fairly minimal new feature list, but that’s a reflection of what Canonical is trying to achieve. Whereas it once used to focus on making Ubuntu the most user-friendly operating system around, these days Canonical seems more interested in marketing it as the best OS for running other kinds of open-source software efficiently and easily. That’s why there’s so much focus on orchestration tools like Juju, and it also explains why Canonical offers OpenStack training courses to familiarize people with using Ubuntu as a foundation for their OpenStack clouds.

It might not be so exciting for adherents of a free software utopia, but it’s just the kind of thing that organizations looking to run open-source apps on a low-cost platform might like.

Ubuntu Server 14.10 is available for download now, while a more detailed look at the new specs and features can be found here.