2023 was an epic year for artificial intelligence. In a year when industry raced faster than academia in machine learning (source), the state of the art for AI evolved to include increasingly larger amounts of data, and bringing to bear sufficient computing resources to support new use cases remained a challenge for many organisations. With the rise of AI, concerns were not far behind.

Whenever it comes to a small-scale private cloud infrastructure project roll-out, organisations usually face a serious dilemma. The implementation process often seems complex due to a lack of knowledge, tricky migrations and an immediate need from management to run various extensions, such as Kubernetes, on top.

As the adoption of confidential computing continues to grow, customers expect their confidential workloads to be strongly separated from their underlying cloud providers. To better align with these user requirements, Canonical is excited to announce ephemeral OS disks for Ubuntu confidential VMs (CVMs) on Microsoft Azure – a new solution that enables you to store disks on your VM’s OS cache disk or temp/resource disk, without needing to save to any remote Azure Storage.

A new upstream Kubernetes release, 1.29, is generally available, with significant new features and bugfixes. Canonical closely follows upstream development, harmonising our releases to deliver timely and up-to-date enhancements backed by our commitment to security and support – which means that MicroK8s 1.29 is now generally available as well and Charmed Kubernetes 1.29 will join shortly.

Ubuntu’s long standing reputation for performance is rooted in our commitment to delivering the latest code, kernels and compilers. This commitment ensures that developers have access to the fastest and most secure environment for their applications. Today Canonical is raising the bar for performance and observability in all of our products.