Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical make a lot of noise about phones and tablets they’re not shipping and desktop interfaces that are liked by some and loathed by many. Not that my current favorite environment, GNOME 3, is the object of universal love (hint: it’s not).

But on the server, Canonical is quietly making itself indispensable. It’s innovating like crazy with Juju, and if you want to spin up a virtual server on Amazon EC2, something I’m doing right now, Ubuntu is pretty much dominating that space.

If you want a “free” image, there’s a whole lot of Ubuntu out there, and more importantly (for me) — a whole lot of help in getting things set up and running. Luckily most of this information translates quite well into Debian (which Ubuntu is based on, if you didn’t already know). And Debian is making an effort to push images to Amazon EC2. A new debian-cloud mailing list will help you keep up with development.

But Ubuntu has quite a head start, and cloud is clearly important to Canonical and Ubuntu. You can use the stock Amazon Linux images, which are based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but any familiarity you have with the Debian/Ubuntu way of doing things will come in very handy in running your Ubuntu virtual server under EC2.