Enterprise cloud computing with Ubuntu on Windows Azure

The emergence of public cloud computing has changed the IT landscape for developers and enterprises, making it significantly easier and more cost effective to develop and deploy new applications, services and infrastructure. Enterprises can choose among cloud providers to meet their needs for performance, features, price and flexibility that will support their technology strategy today as well as in the future.

Today, Microsoft Corp. has announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, its public cloud offering with the ability to create and manage both Windows and Linux virtual machines. As part of Canonical’s Certified Public Cloud Program, Ubuntu on Windows Azure is fully certified and has been tested and optimised by Canonical and Microsoft for excellent performance and reliability. Enterprises that require both Windows and Linux can choose the right operating system for running their workloads based on application performance and availability.

Canonical and Microsoft have been working together to make Ubuntu run seamlessly on Windows Azure. As Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft commented:

“Windows Azure is committed to openness and interoperability. Having Ubuntu available to Windows Azure users is a big step forward for interoperability in the public cloud. Our customers can deploy mission critical applications on both Windows Server and Linux and across both public and private clouds.”

Ubuntu Server is highly available, secure, built for scale and provides the tools that simplify and reduce the cost of cloud deployments. So, for enterprises looking to deploy demanding cloud oriented workloads such as Hadoop, Cassandra and other scale out type applications, Ubuntu on Windows Azure will be a familiar and well suited offering that provides maximum deployment flexibility. This includes hybrid clouds where applications and data can remain behind the company firewall for security or compliance reasons, and that are able to access public cloud resources on demand. As the leading guest OS in most major public clouds, Ubuntu can be deployed across multiple public clouds at scale for pricing and redundancy benefits as well as avoiding lock-in to a single cloud provider.

At Canonical, we invest in the Ubuntu experience to provide the most complete combination of performance, update handling, compliance and reliability in the market. We also extend our commercial offerings of support, systems management, audit compliance and IP assurance to commercial customers using Ubuntu on certified public clouds.