Canonical's Ubuntu Pro is planning to mark its new entry on another cloud-based service. On Monday, Canonical and Google declared the availability of Ubuntu Pro for all Google Cloud users. The advanced version of Ubuntu is all geared now for the developers and administrators of the enterprises. Ubuntu Pro offers a secured DevOps environment with bug patches and guaranteed updates for ten years, along with compliance for regulated applications and workloads.
Although, since 2014, Canonical has offered Ubuntu for Google Cloud, the pro version of Ubuntu was available on two other major cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Through Ubuntu Pro, cloud users can get a more secure, robust, and cost-effective environment to drive cloud adoption and development.
In a press release, June Yang, VP and GM for Compute at Google Cloud said, "Enterprise customers are progressively adopting Google Cloud to run their core business-critical and customer-oriented applications. The availability of Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud will offer additional security and compliance services to our enterprise customers for their critical workloads."
Apart from providing the standard Ubuntu features and components, Ubuntu Pro through Google Cloud offers several additional services of value to the enterprise customers, which includes:
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Coverage of high and critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) across Ubuntu's massive repository, layering more than 30,000 packages, including Node.js, MongoDB, Redis, and Apache Kafka.
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Live kernel patching to provide virtual machine instances tighter security and better uptime.
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A 10 years commitment with longstanding support for maintenance and security patches, where tenure applies to Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS and higher; the maintenance period for Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS is eight years.
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Certified components supporting the operating environments under compliance guidelines such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, and ISO.
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The scheduling of numerous features for the second half of 2020, such as certified FIPS 140-2 components, a security console for the Security Command Center, and Managed Apps.
Kartik Gupta, the engineering manager for CI/CD & FinOps at tech company Gojek, said in a press release, "We needed more time to test and migrate our Ubuntu 16.04 LTS workloads to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. However, that would stretch beyond the standard maintenance timeframe for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. With Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, we can now postpone this, and by migrating our 16.04 workloads to Ubuntu Pro, we benefit from its live kernel patching and advanced security coverage for our prime open-source components."
Google Cloud users can purchase Ubuntu Pro directly through the GCP dashboard or Google Cloud Marketplace. The total cost comprises the licensing fee of running premium Ubuntu Pro images and the regular expense of running the virtual machine.
The total license expense combines the monetary charge for RAM per GB per hour plus that of the virtual CPU per hour. According to Google, running Ubuntu Pro will be 3% to 4.5% of your average computing cost. That means the more computing resources you consume, the lesser the percentage you pay for Ubuntu Pro.