June 13, Vancouver, OpenInfra Summit – Canonical today announced the extension of its commercial OpenStack offering to small-scale cloud environments with a new project Sunbeam. The project is 100% open source and is available free-of-charge. Early adopters can also opt-in for comprehensive security coverage and full commercial support under the Ubuntu Pro + Support subscriptions once they complete the deployment themselves.

From applications in telecommunications to edge cloud and industrial digital twins, experimenting with real-time capabilities in cloud technologies is a trend in the industry. Applications for the edge often have an additional requirement as they interact with real-time systems: they need to run deterministically. It means that time constraints their execution and interaction within the system.

Canonical announced the general availability of Ubuntu’s real-time kernel earlier this year. Since then, our community raised several questions regarding the workings of the kernel and tuning guidelines. We aim to provide answers in this and an upcoming follow-up post. Depending on your background knowledge, you may wish to start with the basics of preemption and a real-time system. In that case, this introductory webinar or our blog series on what is real-time Linux, is for you.

Canonical’s MLOps portfolio is growing with a new machine learning tool. Charmed MLFlow 2.1 is now available in Beta. MLFlow is a crucial component of the open-source MLOps ecosystem. The project announced it had passed 10 million monthly downloads at the end of 2022. With Charmed MLFlow users benefit from a platform where they can easily manage machine learning models and workflows.

5G has the potential to revolutionise the telecommunications industry, offering high speed and connectivity for a wide range of devices ranging from radio access networks (RAN), user equipment (UE), and core networks. However, the high costs associated with 5G infrastructure have been a significant blocker for adoption, hindering innovation and growth in this area. This blog discusses the primary challenges faced in the telecom industry and how open source technologies are helping to resolve them.

In today’s rapidly changing digital environment, the significance of robust Docker container security measures cannot be overstated. Even the containerised layer is subject to compliance standards, which raise security concerns and compliance requirements. Docker container security measures entail safeguarding our lightweight, appliance-type containers –each encapsulating code and its dependencies– from threats and vulnerabilities.

The retail industry is going through a period of major upheaval. AI is transforming the landscape at a rapid pace. Grand View Research evaluated the market value at USD 5.79 billion in 2021 and this is expected to grow at a 23.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2022 to 2030. For retailers, this translates into a need to adapt to an entirely new paradigm of customer expectations.

Canonical began the development of Ubuntu Core in 2014, to create a fully-containerised platform for IoT. In Ubuntu Core, we use the same kernel container technology that Docker and LXC are built on, to put every component of the system into a secure sandbox, with well-defined upgrade and rollback. We did this to enable autonomous connected Internet of Things devices to receive updates which they could apply without human intervention, to address security and business needs at the edge.

Generative AI projects like ChatGPT have motivated enterprises to rethink their AI strategy and make it a priority. In a report published by PwC, 72% of respondents said they were confident in the ROI of artificial intelligence. More than half of respondents also state that their AI projects are compliant with applicable regulations (57%) and protect systems from cyber attacks, threats or manipulations (55%). Production-grade AI initiatives are not an easy task.

As we announced at Cephalocon 2023 in Amsterdam, Canonical has started to make container images for Ceph available. We received lots of questions at the booth about what it means to the average Ceph user who has or wants to deploy Ceph on Ubuntu. In this blog post, we will cover the benefits to users who are running containerised Ceph on Ubuntu, and specifically how these images can provide an improved security posture.