On October 17 Canonical released a new version of its free and open source operating system Ubuntu for server and cloud environments. This release supports the new OpenStack Havana, integrates VMware vSphere and a new version of its service orchestration tool Juju that is supporting containerised application deployment. The two releases Ubuntu 13.10 and OpenStack Havana were actually launched on the same day to probably stress the collaboration between the two companies.
Lately the Ubuntu community delivered various solutions and applications on top of the operating system. The Juju service orchestration tool would allow to scale workloads securely from a browser or the command line, it also can deploy an entire software environment or service bundled directly from Juju, enabling administrators to share entire complex workloads consisting of many related parts.
Ubuntu 13.10 also issued Juju management of LXC containers, allowing multiple services to run on the same physical or virtual machine. A part from including OpenStack Havana, it includes also updated tools such as Ceilometer for metering and monitoring, and Heat for auto-scaling.
Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and VP Products for Canonical, declares:
Ubuntu 13.10 delivers the latest and best version of OpenStack, and is the fastest, most flexible platform for scale-out computing, Ubuntu is typically used in very large scale deployments. In this release we’ve tuned the cloud deployment experience for very small clusters as well, to support dev-and-test environments. The ability to deploy Ubuntu OpenStack alongside ESXi with orchestration that spans both properties is extremely valuable, bringing OpenStack right to the centre of common enterprise virtualization practice.