The Ubuntu Server Survey is finally ready to be published it makes for a fascinating read. It is the third survey of its kind and again it has been an overwhelming response with over 6,000 completed surveys throughout 2011 and a heartfelt thanks to all who took the time to complete the comprehensive survey.

The overwhelming impression is the widespread use of Ubuntu both geographically as you might expect with respondents from across the globe. but also in the broad range of workloads in which Ubuntu Server finds itself used. Every category from web and data servers to cloud shows up strongly albeit with a strong bias towards traditional workloads.

As we approach an LTS, again we see evidence of the popularity of the extended support releases. Given we have run this survey three times now over the past three years now we begin to see strong evidence of the switching from one LTS to the next, particularly as the deployment platform, so our user base is certainly staying with us as as we introduce new features and support them in the long term.

Virtualization and cloud are now key elements of Ubuntu use, and for the first time we see KVM overtake Xen as the preferred virtualization technology for Ubuntu users, significant as the platform was the first to make the switch to supporting KVM as the native technology. With that though, VMWare remains the most cited virtualization technology showing a healthy mixture of open source and other technologies at use in the Ubuntu user base.

The respondents consideration of cloud makes for interesting reading too. There is significant interest but the use of Ubuntu Server on bare metal remains the primary use case for most users today. There is strong recognition though of the emergence of this powerful technology and with the plans for ease of installation and orchestration in 12.04 LTS it will be interesting to see how this moves the dial in regards to uptake in the Ubuntu base. A deeper analysis  shows a bias towards larger companies (i.e. respondents with more servers) using cloud technologies which is to be expected and overwhelmingly there is recognition of the suitability of Ubuntu Cloud as a basis for those efforts.

Enjoy the full report, it would be very interesting to hear your comments.

Canonical will have a presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, from the 10th – 13th January. The booth, in the Upper Level of South Hall 4, is at location 35379 within the Las Vegas Convention Center.

On display will be the latest in Desktop, Cloud and demonstrations on Ubuntu One, plus an exclusive Ubuntu concept design which will be announced during the show.

Find out more by coming to visit us at CES and see why Ubuntu is the primary computing environment on millions of desktops around the world and used by thousands of businesses. You can also discover how Canonical supports a rapidly increasing number of manufacturers pre-installing Ubuntu on their hardware.

To set up a meeting at the show and discuss Ubuntu, now the world’s third largest Desktop Operating System, email sales@canonical.com.

Last week saw the third annual Ubuntu Hardware Summit (UHS) taking place in Taipei. With over two hundred attendees present, the show is fast becoming one of the must-attend events within the software, ODM and OEM environments across Taiwan.

With standing room only at the back of the room during the Keynote speech, Canonical set the scene for the next two years including the growth of Ubuntu, the multitude of device enablement and an insight into Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu Server. After the Keynote, UHS then went into break-out Tracks which included topics on Ubuntu Cloud, Thin Client solutions, hardware enablement and Ubuntu System Architecture.

You can find all presentations from the day at odm.ubuntu.com and clicking the link ‘Download material’.

Juju is Devops Distilled

Cloud deployment is different. It involves tighter devops handovers, the ability to scale services both up and down, and hybrid cloud computing: moving services between your private cloud and multiple public cloud providers.

Accelerated provisioning through IAAS has put the spotlight on friction in the deployment, configuration and management of services. This friction can only be overcome via a change in emphasis, from configuring machines to connecting services that can then be scaled independently. In other words, service orchestration.

With Juju, services can be deployed, connected, upgraded and re-used by defining them as Juju charms. Encapsulating service intelligence in charms enables you to separate deep service-specific skills from broad operations management skills.

This webinar, jointly presented by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and Clint Byrum, a devops expert, will cover cloud deployment and devops with Juju.

Register Now!

The Ubuntu Developer Summit – UDS – is a major event in the Canonical calendar. Taking place every six months, it is the Ubuntu event which defines the focus and plans for our up-coming version of Ubuntu. In the first week of November, over 800 people, from Canonical engineers and employees, Ubuntu community members, partners, ISVs, upstreams and many more gathered to discuss and plan for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04, code-named Precise Pangolin.

UDS covered 420 sessions, under nine tacks, from desktop to design, community to server and cloud. Attendees worked in the usual collaborative and open environment and spent the week pooling their experience and expertise and sharing best practise resulting, as always, in the very best ideas. Right now, those ideas are are represented in hundreds of blueprint documents and are being put into action by developers, community and Canonical, who are already driving forward for April’s launch. As a practical demonstration of that openness you can track our progress here (note, it’s early days!): http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-precise/.

Focus on desktop and the cloud

Over the coming months, we’ll see much more of the fruits of UDS’ labour as new features are developed and collaborations and partnerships formed. Right now, the focus is on refinement, quality and stabilisation. As Ubuntu 12.04 will be a LTS release, which, for the first time, will be supported for five years, getting performance and stability right will be extremely important. For businesses, cloud is becoming ever more important, so we’ll be looking at building out a robust test infrastructure; there will be continued support for the latest releases of OpenStack and much effort will be put into improving Juju and developing the Charms collection.

For our desktop users, refinement of the interface is a continued focus and we’ll regularly run usability testing to make sure Ubuntu looks and feels great. For ubuntu 12.04, there will be a lot of developments for power users, including multi-monitor support, and improvements to boot speed, text-free boot and power consumption. And of course, the community centres around the developer programme, design, governance and loco teams. Engaging and embracing developers continues to be important (for free software) as we seek to bring new and exciting applications to the Ubuntu platform.

Our wonderful sponsors

We also wanted to take this opportunity to extend a special thank you to all of our sponsors who helped us accomplish this monumental task. Cloud Foundry, Rackspace, Google, System 76, Freescale, Nebula, as well as our media partners, Ubuntu User, Linux Pro Magazine, all attended and contributed to the success of UDS in different ways. Some gave plenary sessions;
Brian Thomason and Juan Negron – Cloudfoundry Server deployments using Juju
James Blair and Monty Taylor – Rackspace – Distributed QA in the OpenStack Project

It’s Linaro’s summit too

Also, for the second time, UDS was co-hosted with the Linaro Connect event, where the best software developers met to plan out and code the future of Linux on ARM. Canonical has been actively participating in the Linaro project since it began in 2010, and having both events run in parallel is a good opportunity to share new ideas and collaborate. ARM continues to gain more traction in traditional PC areas, such as the data center and Ubuntu continues to contribute to the enablement of ARM. You can hear more from David Brash’s Linaro plenary, An ARM Technology Update.

And a vision for what’s next

While the focus for Canonical and the Ubuntu community is firmly on the next launch , we’ve already started to think beyond this release. In Mark’s opening keynote, he talked of extending the Ubuntu mission; “‘Linux for Human Beings’ cannot end at the desktop, but needs to take into account the devices that will be used by human beings in the years to come….”. In the coming two years, we’ll start to see Ubuntu powering tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud. You can read more on Mark’s vision for the future of Ubuntu on his blog: or see the full keynote.

For lots more video and insight you can check out the excellent Ubuntu Developers Channel on YouTube

So, roll on Ubuntu 12.04!

This year’s Ubuntu Hardware Summit (UHS) will take place on December 8th at the Grand Victoria Hotel in Taipei. You can register your place at www.ubuntu.com.uhs

Building on the success of 2010 (with over 200 attendees), the 2011 Ubuntu Hardware Summit promises to deliver more. With keynote speeches from various members of the Canonical team and a more focused technical delivery, UHS is created especially for product managers and engineers at ODMs and OEMs, with interest or responsibility in deploying Ubuntu on new computers and devices.

Highlights will include presentations on Ubuntu Server, deploying Ubuntu Cloud, QA, power management, hardware enablement….and much more! Details of the event can also be found on the new Ubuntu Hardware Debugging website at http://odm.ubuntu.com/portal/

UHS is sponsored by Canonical and free of charge.

To reserve your space, visit www.ubuntu.com/uhs today as registrations will close on 29th November 2011.

Today HP announced Project Moonshot  - a programme to accelerate the use of low power processors in the data centre.

The three elements of the announcement are the launch of Redstone – a development platform that harnesses low-power processors (both ARM & x86),  the opening of the HP Discovery lab in Houston and the Pathfinder partnership programme.

Canonical is delighted to be involved in all three elements of HP’s Moonshot programme to reduce both power and complexity in data centres.

The HP Redstone platform unveiled in Palo Alto showcases HP’s thinking around highly federated environments and Calxeda’s EnergyCore ARM processors. The Calxeda system on chip (SoC) design is powered by Calxeda’s own ARM based processor and combines mobile phone like power consumption with the attributes required to run a tangible proportion of hyperscale data centre workloads.

The promise of server grade SoC’s running at less than 5W and achieving per rack density of 2800+ nodes is impressive, but what about the software stacks that are used to run the web and analyse big data – when will they be ready for this new architecture?

Ubuntu Server is increasingly the operating system of choice for web, big data and cloud infrastructure workloads. Films like Avatar are rendered on Ubuntu, Hadoop is run on it and companies like Rackspace and HP are using Ubuntu Server as the foundation of their public cloud offerings.

The good news is that Canonical has been working with ARM and Calexda for several years now and we released the first version of Ubuntu Server ported for ARM Cortex A9 class  processors last month.

The Ubuntu 11.10 release (download) is an functioning port and over the next six months and we will be working hard to benchmark and optimize Ubuntu Server and the workloads that our users prioritize on ARM.  This work, by us and by upstream open source projects is going to be accelerated by today’s announcement and access to hardware in the HP Discovery lab.

As HP stated today, this is beginning of a journey to re-inventing a power efficient and less complex data center. We look forward to working with HP and Calxeda on that journey.

November 16th – 2pm UK time

After years of development and fine tuning, the cloud vision of true computing elasticity is finally a reality. The question now is how organisations can best take advantage of the latest cloud technologies to optimise their IT, scale infrastructure and services in near-real time, and make the most of new market opportunities.

In our webinar, Ubuntu’s Founder Mark Shuttleworth and Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady share their ideas on the cloud and the benefits it offers businesses today. They discuss how open-source technologies in general, and Ubuntu Cloud in particular, can help companies avoid frustrating vendor lock-in and stay in control of their own cloud destinies. They also explore Ubuntu’s unique attributes, looking at how it minimises hardware and software costs, accelerates cloud deployment, and supports dynamic service provisioning and scaling.

Register now: http://www.brighttalk.com/channel/6793

Great news that Ubuntu 11.10 will include Cloud Foundry, an open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) that enables developers to build, deploy and run Cloud applications. Other PaaS offerings have typically locked you into using specific frameworks and services defined by the PaaS vendor as well as proprietary host platforms. This has made migrating applications between different providers as well as moving applications back into your own data center difficult if not impossible.

Cloud Foundry is the world’s first Open PaaS with your choice of frameworks, application services and Cloud deployment platforms. Cloud Foundry is made to be extensible so that while Spring, Rails, Sinatra and Node.js apps are supported today more frameworks can be added in the future as they gain in popularity. Even more exciting is that you will be able to run your PaaS in any cloud or behind your own firewall if you choose. No lock-in to a single development framework or Cloud vendor!

In Ubuntu 11.10 we’ve added client and server deployment tools using Ensemble that allow you to easily deploy a single node server in minutes as well as a distributed, multi node environment quickly and easily to create a production quality PaaS. You can deploy applications in AWS, Openstack or on your own internal servers.

Stay tuned as we’ll be doing more exciting work with Cloud Foundry. We encourage you to check out Cloud Foundry in Ubuntu 11.10 and learn more about the project at www.cloudfoundry.org