OpenStack vs AWS is a discussion that almost every organisation must conduct when adopting a cloud strategy. This is because OpenStack and AWS are undoubtedly some of the most popular cloud technologies in both public and private cloud space. While AWS is the most popular commercial cloud platform, OpenStack remains its most popular open source equivalent. Both have their own pros and cons. But which one is better for you?

Are you spending time on high-impact, high-value activities, or are you constantly derailed by maintenance, support, and deployment challenges? Does your organisation consume open-source software that needs security patching? Where do you get the security updates from, and how do you track what’s available? Are you responsible for vulnerability management, compliance, and long term maintenance of the software running on top of Ubuntu in your organisation?

Juju re-imagines the world of operating software securely, reliably, and at scale. Juju realizes the promise of model-driven operations. Excellent observability is undeniably a key ingredient for operating software well, which is why the Charmed Operator ecosystem has long provided operators the ability to run a variety of open source monitoring software. We collectively refer to these operators as the Logs, Metrics, and Alerts (LMA) stack.

The release of OpenStack Charms 21.10 brings native support for OpenStack Xena in Charmed OpenStack. This latest version of OpenStack comes with initial support for SmartNICs in Nova and further improvements around Neutron Open Virtual Network (OVN) driver integration. In order to further simplify the job of the cloud operations teams, the OpenStack Charms 21.10 release offers improved day-2 automation, including additional charm actions and better upgrade experience, and new operations documentation.

Last week, we celebrated the Ubuntu 21.10 release on the Ubuntu On Air channel, where a wide range of guests discussed their Impish Indri highlights as well as some thoughts for the future. Today we thought we would share ours! For Linux desktop users, Impish Indri contains a number of new features plus a preview or two for you to try out ahead of our LTS release next year with 22.04. So here are our top 5 must try for Ubuntu Desktop 21.10.

The fintech ecosystem is flourishing and exciting things are happening these days at the intersection of digital technology and financial services – thanks in part to an infusion of global fintech investment that reached US$98 billion across 2,456 deals in H1’21. This far outpaces last year’s annual total of $121.5 billion across 3,520 deals.

Ubuntu 21.10 is the latest release of Ubuntu and comes as the last interim release before the forthcoming 22.04 LTS release due in April 2022. As the interim releases are often proving grounds for upcoming features in the LTS releases, this provides a good opportunity to take stock of some of the latest security features delivered in this release, on the road to 22.04 LTS.

DFI’s GHF51 mini industrial-grade motherboard, and the EC90A-GH mini fanless industrial computer, are the world’s first industrial computer products that have passed the Ubuntu IoT hardware certification and are equipped with high-performance AMD processors.

September news is charged with analysis and comment of what has been a month with important announcements for open source robotics. It has been a month to understand that, in a nascent and fragmented market, the actors have a deeper impact upon all the stakeholders. A flop won’t be just a flop, it could be the reason why someone won’t give a robot a chance. What? Ok, let’s start.

Ubuntu Server 21.10 (Impish Indri) expands on edge use cases with a minimised system installation option in the Ubuntu Server Live Installer. It also comes with needrestart enabled by default for automated daemon restarts after applying library updates. In addition, the latest development cycle brings native, certified drivers for NVIDIA vGPU software on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS, fully supporting sophisticated AI/ML workloads. Ubuntu Server 21.10 will be supported by Canonical until July 2022.

14 October 2021: Today, Canonical released Ubuntu 21.10 – the most productive environment for cloud-native developers and AI/ML innovators across the desktop, devices and cloud. “As open source becomes the new default, we aim to bring Ubuntu to all the corners of the enterprise and all the places developers want to innovate,” said Mark Shuttleworth.

Late last year, SUSE completed their acquisition of Rancher Labs, and in doing so, has had to make some decisions on their product roadmap and ongoing support commitments. SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE’s software-defined storage product based on Ceph, doesn’t appear to have made the cut. According to their support pages, it is scheduled for End of Life with milestones in January 2021 and 2022.

This blog post is part of our data centre networking series.

The recent contexts have shown that enterprises needed to take a different approach regarding their digital transformation and its prioritisation. They’ve experienced the need to run new configurations and operations remotely on their infrastructure. This quickly showed the benefits of automation solutions to run those changes from few central locations, which highly facilitated the task of systems and network admins.

Bare metal Kubernetes (K8s) is now easier than ever. Spectro Cloud has recently posted an article about integrating Kubernetes with MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service. In the article, they describe how they have created a provider for the Kubernetes Cluster API for Canonical MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service). This blog describes briefly the benefits of bare metal K8s, the challenges it presents, and how the work by Saad Malik and the team from Spectro Cloud solves those challenges.

Canonical’s Ubuntu Frame is an easy-to-use, reliable and secure fullscreen shell to power edge devices, with 10 years of support from Canonical. October 6th, 2021: Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu Frame, a solution that allows developers to easily build and deploy graphical applications for interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other products that require a graphical output.

The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is expanding at a rapid rate, with the number of devices growing every year. The increase in physical hardware being manufactured multiplies the amount of software needed to perform various functions on new platforms. There are a range of IoT use cases, including voice-controlling the lights in your home, monitoring air pollution, or the parking feature of a self-driving car.