Ubuntu 14.10 for cloud and servers is now available for download from Canonical. This latest release introduces the leading technologies for rapid and reliable creation of scale-out environments such as PAAS and big data, and industry-leading security for containers.

Ubuntu 14.10 includes Cloud Foundry, the leading open source PAAS environment, along with big data solutions for Hadoop with Hive and Pig Latin, Elasticsearch with Kibana, NoSQL, and real-time data analytics with Spark and Storm, meeting growing enterprise demand for these complex workloads on Ubuntu. Juju's GUI now provides precision control of workload placement which greatly simplifies the deployment and scaling of these complex solutions on public and private clouds or on bare metal via MAAS, with complete deployments taking just minutes. Juju support for containers enables very high workload density in both cloud and physical environments.

Ubuntu 14.10 features the fastest, most secure hypervisors, as well as the latest in container technology with LXC and docker. Ubuntu is unique in delivering user-level container control, the ability for any user to spin up containers without the need for administrative privileges, providing higher security, privilege separation and greater system robustness. Containers enable higher density cloud operations than a traditional virtualisation layer.

On bare metal, Ubuntu 14.10 presents a consistent operating system experience for all major architectures: ARM, x86 and POWER8. ARM64 support in Ubuntu underpins the launch of next-generation hyperscale, hyperdense servers from HP and AMD. Ubuntu is the first commercially-supported enterprise platform for ARM64 computing, and the first commercially-supported platform for the new generation of POWER8 servers. Ubuntu 14.10 adds disk acceleration to bring low SSD latencies to large, cost-effective rotating disks.

The new release includes Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS), the leading scale-out hardware provisioning tool, which now supports provisioning Windows Server/Hyper-V, CentOS, and openSUSE. MAAS turns any cluster of physical machines into an on-demand scale-out platform for bare-metal workloads like Hadoop, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack, and has been adopted in many large-scale infrastructure environments at service providers and private enterprise, such as NEC's new hosting service. MAAS gives NEC customers immediate access to physical machines running Windows, CentOS or Ubuntu via a simple web interface or network API.

80% of the large-scale OpenStack deployments today are on Ubuntu, and this release extends Canonical's leadership with OpenStack Juno, the latest release from OpenStack. It includes more granular policy controls for object storage as well as network function virtualisation (NFV) for telecommunications industry users.

New features allow for network traffic optimisation for multicast and broadcast traffic flow in OpenStack clouds, with horizontally scalable Neutron gateways for software-defined networking. 14.10 also features IPv6 support in OpenStack, Juju and MAAS, and industry first.

Juju simplifies the design, deployment and management of large-scale, complex systems such as OpenStack. Juju's GUI has been extended to include a machine view, which enables developers to easily manage scale-out workloads at the machine level, in addition to the service level, with drag and drop control of workload placement in machines and containers. The view shows exactly where services are deployed, making it easier to diagnose and manage cloud environments. Juju also now unifies orchestration of Windows workloads alongside Linux.

Canonical's cloud ecosystem, the largest in the industry,  is accelerating. The Canonical OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) builds over 3,000 OpenStack clouds each month, using different combinations of third party technologies, to assure customers  of the interoperability and performance of their preferred solutions in the OpenStack ecosystem. OIL welcomes new partners including Stratus Technologies, CPLANE NETWORKS, Nuage Networks, PMC Sierra, MetaSwitch and Quanta. A full list of OIL partners can be found online.

Many new clouds have signed up to Canonical's Certified Public Cloud (CPC) programme, including BrightBox and CloudSigma who join the leading public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, VMware, and Windows Azure. The program offers the best, most secure Ubuntu images guaranteed to deliver an optimal Ubuntu user experience for developers and customers.

Availability

Ubuntu Server 14.10 is available for download at www.ubuntu.com/download from the 23rd October 2014.