Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ubuntu 18.04 ‘Bionic Beaver’ is reaching End of Standard Support this April, also known sometimes as End Of Life (EOL). This distribution of Ubuntu was installed by millions of users and powers up thousands of devices. From kiosks and appliances to IoT devices and robots, 18.04 helped many companies deploy innovations to the world. As with all other Ubuntu LTS releases that reach their end of standard support, Bionic Beaver will transition to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM).

The flexibility of public cloud infrastructure allows for little to no upfront expense, and is great when starting a venture or testing an idea. But once a dataset grows and becomes predictable, it can become a significant base cost, compounded further by additional costs depending on how you are consuming that data.

Over the last couple of decades, a lot has changed in terms of how companies are running their infrastructure. The days of dedicated physical servers are long gone, and there are a variety of options for making the most out of your hosts, regardless of whether you’re running them on-prem or in the cloud. Virtualization paved the way for scalability, standardization and cost optimisation. Containerization brought new efficiencies.

Cloud optimisation enables organisations to significantly lower their cloud spending while ensuring the desired performance and necessary compliance. It’s a process that every business should adopt when choosing cloud infrastructure as a foundation for their applications. It’s been proven that applying cloud optimisation best practices leads to a total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction of two-thirds under certain circumstances. But let’s step back for a second.

It’s a new year, and an especially great time to reflect on the security of your robots. After all, those interested in breaching it are probably doing the same. In previous articles, we discussed ROS security by detailing practical steps for securing your robots on Ubuntu and the challenges the community faces. In this blog post, I’ll give you some strategies, tips and open-source tools you can integrate into your development process today to ramp up the security of your project.

In a previous post, I explained how we made our Ubuntu image 15 times smaller by chiselling a specific slice of Ubuntu for.NET developers. In this blog, I will provide step-by-step instructions on customising your chiselled Ubuntu base images for any use case. I don’t believe in a perfect container base image anymore.

In this blog, I explain the idea behind Distroless container images, which inspired us to create chiselled Ubuntu images — adding the “distro” back to distro-less! In a follow-up blog, I will then provide a step-by-step example of how you can create your own chiselled Ubuntu base container images, built for your specific needs.

The popular open-source platform Kubescape by ARMO has been recently announced as a fully managed operator called a Charm for Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes distribution. This collaboration between Canonical and ARMO is exciting for the solution it enables for end users, ultimately resulting in hardened and more secure Kubernetes environments.

When people think of home security they usually think of an alarm system with a keypad next to the door. These days, however, home security should have two meanings. I’m here to talk about the second: cybersecurity. In other words, security in the smart home.

In 2022, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) exploded in popularity, with millions of users taking advantage of the ability to develop, create and administrate inside a native Linux environment deeply integrated with Windows. This is thanks in large part to continued investment from Microsoft, consistently rolling out new features and updates for the platform on both Windows 10 and Windows 11.