Digital transformation is sweeping every industry, and the broad accessibility enabled by the cloud allows products and businesses — ranging from self-driving vehicles to nationwide retail — to innovate at light speed. To help these companies thrive in the cloud, Amazon Web Services Inc. offers enterprises a range of supportive virtualization tools and the opportunity to utilize the AWS operating system, which promotes broad flexibility and a high level of security.

One of Amazon’s key partners, Canonical Ltd, is responsible for providing the foundation that many enterprises build their software as a service offerings on with its operating service Ubuntu.

“If you’re starting a new company or technology, you almost by default start on Ubuntu. … Every place where you are going to find compute in these next couple of years as we move into the 5G [network] revolution are connected to services on the back end, the majority of those hosted in Amazon, and … running Ubuntu,” said Dustin Kirkland (pictured), vice president of product development for Ubuntu at Canonical.

Kirkland spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd., during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed Ubuntu’s impact on organizations of all types and how the company supports enterprises with their expanding cloud needs. (* Disclosure below.)

Security mission critical for Ubuntu

Amazon brought Ubuntu into its platform in 2008, offering it as the operating service thousands of enterprises would build their cloud and “internet of things” strategies on in the years to come.

“The connected part of a connected device means it has to be connected to something. And what’s it going to be connected to? The cloud. Every smart autonomous driving vehicle, every oil rig out in West Texas, every airplane, every boat, every ship,” Kirkland said. This year, more than 125 million instances of Ubuntu have launched in AWS alone, he added.

Through AWS, Canonical works with some of the largest businesses in the world, providing security and streamlined processing for retailers, automated vehicles and businesses across a range of industries. “The majority of those vehicles are running Ubuntu on the auto driving unit … a little unit inside a car … that’s exactly what’s powering every autonomous vehicle in the world,” Kirkland said.

Canonical works with both AWS and Nvidia Corp. to enable the general purpose graphic processing units that Nvidia produces and Amazon exposes in some of its largest machine learning type instances. “Those instances powered by Ubuntu are working directly with that GPU out of the box by default. … That is at the heart of everything happening in the artificial intelligence space,” he said.

The sensitivity and volume of data seen by Ubuntu require the system to be protected by the highest level of security. Many of the new features Canonical has created in Ubuntu are around optimizing security updates and enabling customers to make those updates active without rebooting the system.

“Security has to be utmost, and being able to do that without impacting the downtime. … Zero downtime kernel updates is something we call the Livepatch Service, which we deliver in Amazon for Ubuntu Amazon users,” Kirkland said.

With Ubuntu underpinning so many enterprises, the company is also working on solutions that support customers well into the future. “Each Ubuntu release has a five-year life cycle, but some enterprises actually need to run Ubuntu for much longer than five years. For those enterprises, we provide security updates after … that five-year end of life. And in many cases that helps them bridge that gap until the next release of Ubuntu,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Canonical Ltd sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Canonical nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE