UPDATED 23:16 EDT / JULY 09 2018

CLOUD

Canonical intros Minimal Ubuntu OS for software containers

U.K. software company Canonical Ltd. today released yet another slimmed-down release of its Ubuntu operating system.

Designed for software containers and cloud computing, the new Minimal Ubuntu OS Docker image weighs in at just 29 megabytes.

The Minimal Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support release, as it’s officially known, is said to be an efficient container operating system that developers can use to deploy and manage containerized apps for multiple clouds faster and more easily. Tools including editors, documentation, locales, and other user-oriented features found in Ubuntu Server have been removed. What remains are only the vital components of the boot sequence.

The company said stripping away these features results in much faster boot times, better performance and greater stability.

Software containers are a big deal at the moment, increasingly being used by developers to build next-generation applications that can run on any operating system or infrastructure, without the need for a virtual machine.

This isn’t Canonical’s first bare-basics OS for container workloads. It previously released a 40-megabyte Ubuntu ISO image, which is for those that want to download packages from online archives at the time of installation.

“The small footprint of Minimal Ubuntu, when deployed with fast VM provisioning from GCE, helps deliver drastically improved boot times, making them a great choice for developers looking to build their applications on Google Cloud Platform,” Google Cloud Group Product Manager Paul Nash said in a statement.

Minimal Ubuntu isn’t just designed for Google LLC’s cloud platform, however. It’s also compatible with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack clouds and can make use of their hypervisors. And because it’s available from the Docker Hub, it can also be used in Docker containers hosted on any platform.

Canonical is also offering a downloadable Minimal Ubuntu image that ships with a KVM-optimized kernel that’s been customized for faster boot speeds.

Canonical said Minimal Ubuntu is designed to enable completely automated operations and that users can add any Ubuntu programs to it that are available on the larger versions of the OS.

“As containers become the software deployment option of choice, efficiency becomes paramount,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. “Skimmed down versions of Linux are an encouraging way to start container-based machines faster and with lower resource needs, so this is critical progress for those who want to run their next gen apps in the most scalable way.”

Image: Ubuntu/Facebook

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