The Dragon Propulsion Laboratory recently acquired an Applied Micro Mustang board thanks to a developer promotion Jon pointed me to, and the arrival of the holidays finally gave me a chance to take the device for a spin.

The Mustang, or more properly the X-Gene X-C1 evaluation kit, is APM’s evaluation board for the APM883208-X1 processor, an 8-core, 64-bit ARM processor that is one of the earliest incarnations of ARM’s v8 architecture, ARM’s silver bullet for the server market.

Hardware Setup

The board is a mini-ITX form factor platform meant to evaluate the processor, and is not a production device. My Lian Li test bench was not designed for this form factor, but it was nothing that a quick drill and tap action would not swiftly rectify. I developed a deep-seated allergy to boards sitting free on my desk during my days an embedded developer - the sanity and consistency that a...

The Ubuntu Cloud Zeitgeist: a year in retrospective

The new year is a perfect occasion to reflect on the road we just covered and how far we have come just in this past year.

We opened 2014 shipping the new Ubuntu Server 14.04 on April 17, our third LTS release designed for the cloud. Including five years of support for OpenStack Ice House, it was shown time and again to be the most popular OS platform for OpenStack. We did not stop there: alongside a major set of improvements we included Docker, arguably the hottest cloud infrastructure technology available today – and one where Ubuntu is six times as popular a platform as the runner up. Not satisfied with that milestone, the Server team saw a million Vagrant installs in under nine months. Key author and OpenStack Community leader Kevin Jackson remarked:

“Ubuntu has helped establish OpenStack as the leading open cloud platform

Download your personal cloud architect

Last week, we released the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack beta. Consistent with Ubuntu’s heritage of making hard things simple, we created an intuitive way to provision our best-practices reference architecture of OpenStack, straight from bare metal, and to do it in a shorter time than you will take for your lunch break today.

We designed an intelligent OpenStack installer that is part of Landscape, our Ubuntu systems management product. This is a fully automated reference OpenStack deployment capability, built right into our systems management platform. We created it using Juju, Canonical’s amazing service orchestration technology.

With just a few clicks, any user can build a cloud reflecting the best practices learned through years of work by Canonical Technical Services’ cloud consultants while engaged in designing and building...

Canonical is delighted to welcome CloudSigma as its newest Certified Public Cloud partner. CloudSigma now offers fully optimised and supported Ubuntu Server images, including the latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. CloudSigma will also offer enterprise grade management, monitoring and commercial support direct from Canonical.

As part of the partnership, Canonical has validated and optimised Ubuntu Server guest images for CloudSigma’s public cloud platform. Customers benefit from frequent image refreshing, ensuring new instances are secure from the start. A local mirror of the Ubuntu archive will deliver a lightning-fast experience for software installation and patching.

CloudSigma is widely regarded as one of the most innovative cloud service providers in Europe, and is now expanding to four locations in the US. With a truly flexible IaaS instance architecture, delivering broad choice to...

Launching applications and workloads in the cloud should be a seamless experience – this is the aim of our Certified Public Cloud programme. So we are very excited today to welcome Brightbox as the programme’s newest partner and our very first European cloud partner.

Brightbox is a great match for us, with their strong reputation for ease of use and a loyal following amongst developers and devops practitioners alike. Brightbox was the first cloud provider to implement auto-registration of new Ubuntu cloud images, meaning that new versions of Ubuntu are available within minutes of being officially released by Canonical.

Jeremy Jarvis, Co-founder at Brightbox comments: “We’re big fans of Ubuntu and have a lot in common with Canonical, not least our mutual focus on user experience. Becoming certified by Canonical assures customers that they will receive the best Ubuntu experience at...

The Ubuntu Server BoF is on at this year’s O'Reilly OSCON conference. Patricia Gaughen and I will be joining forces to bring you our dynamic duo of Engineering and Product views. We hope you bring all your questions, ideas, and even complaints – we are all ears! If you run a large Ubuntu installation in a public cloud or a datacenter, we would especially like to hear from you and how can we make the Ubuntu experience even better for you.

We will not make you do all the talking, and we are bringing one of my favorite server talks to share with you, our security deep dive. We hope you can join us in Portland!

UPDATE: Slides are now posted above. Thanks to all for coming despite the tardy hour, and see you next year!

My friend Andy Oram from O'Reilly interviewed me on the current state of OpenStack and the emerging DefCore effort, Ubuntu Server, and my various Arduino hacks. It...

A complete introduction to the shell for novices and masters alike.

Mastery of the shell is what separates boys from men, in the memorable words of The Olde Unix Greybeard. This machudo test of computing proficiency has indeed stood the test of time – a kind of cultural hazing ritual for those who are in the know, as opposed to the namby-pamby who require a graphic interface with options spelled out for every possible task. As one who was struck early by the beauty and versatility of the Unix Shell, I cannot but be pleased by the recent proliferation of books on the subject, popularizing what was often seen as a subject hard to approach and difficult to master. It does certainly pacify my inner drill sergeant!

The Linux Command Line, By William E. Shotts Jr. (No Starch Press, US$ 39.95), is the most recent entry in a veritable pantheon of books dedicated to the subject of using and...

Blowing open the doors to low-power, on-demand supercomputing

Packing impressive supercomputing power inside a small credit card-sized board running Ubuntu, Adapteva‘s $99 ARM-based Parallella system includes the unique Ephiphany numerical accelerator that promises to unleash industrial strength parallel processing on the desktop at a rock-bottom price. The Massachusetts-based startup recently ran a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign and gained widespread attention only to run into a few roadblocks along the way. Now, with their setbacks behind them, Adapteva is slated to deliver its first units mid-December 2013, with volume shipping in the following months.

What makes the Parallella board so exciting is that it breaks new ground: imagine an Open Source Hardware board, powered by just a few Watts of juice, delivering 90 GFLOPS of number crunching. Combine this with the...

Today we’re introducing some new features into Ubuntu’s systems management and monitoring tool, Landscape. Organisations will now be able to use Landscape to manage Hyperscale environments ranging from ARM to x86 low-power designs, adding to Landscape’s existing coverage of Ubuntu in the cloud, data centre server, and desktop environments. There’s an update to the Dedicated Server too, bringing SAAS and Dedicated Server versions in alignment.

Hyperscale is set to address today’s infrastructure challenges by providing compute capacity with less power for lower cost. Canonical is at the forefront of the trend. Ubuntu already powers scale-out workloads on a new wave of low-cost ultradense hardware based on x86 and ARM processors including Calxeda EnergyCore and Intel Atom designs. Ubuntu is also the default OS for HP’s Project Moonshot servers.

This update includes support for ARM...

Landscape’s new release brings to full circle the changes that began a few months ago, beginning with the deprecating of support for Smart package locks: with full APT integration in the client, we are now exposing dpkg holds as first class citizens.

Package holds exist to stop a package from being updated, the most typical case being the commonplace sudo apt-get upgrade mass-upgrade command. We could use package holds to instruct the update stack not to modify my system’s currently installed version of Python:

echo "python2.7 hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections

and good old dpkg would oblige. What we have done here is changing the dpkg policy for this package’s upgrades from the default install to hold, the system does the rest, and stops offering us updates for this package. Similarly, I can set a hold on a package from Landscape, and on a broader selection of our datacenter...