The founder of Canonical had a very interesting keynote at OpenStack Summit 2014

May 23, 2014 09:48 GMT  ·  By

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has been very busy in the last couple of weeks promoting Ubuntu, but not the desktop version. It turns out that Ubuntu is a hit in the cloud ecosystem as well and that it dominates the OpenStack race.

Building a desktop version of Ubuntu is all well and fine, but the major revenue for Canonical doesn't really stem from that department. Canonical is working a lot more on the server side of Ubuntu and they have all the interest to do so. Their distro is becoming the leading operating system in the OpenStack ecosystem and it's increasingly clear that their formula for Ubuntu is a successful one.

When Ubuntu launches a new operating system at six-month intervals, the regular users only see a small part of the effort that goes into building that operating system. In fact, some of the features that captivate the interest of the community, such as the Mir display server or Unity, are just a very small part of what the Canonical developers are actually doing.

This is painfully clear especially when Mark Shuttleworth goes to OpenStack Summit 2014 and makes the case for Ubuntu and all its might. Users might then get a feeling about how big the Ubuntu system really is and why other distros don't even come close, despite their good intentions and usage.

“First, Ubuntu is the leading OpenStack distribution, with 55% of all production are using Ubuntu, nearly 5x the number for RHEL. There is a big squabble at the moment between vendors in the RHEL camp; for the record, Canonical is happy to work with vendors of alternative OpenStack distributions on Ubuntu as long as we have a commercial agreement that enables us to support users. Nonetheless, the standard way to do OpenStack starts with Ubuntu followed by the addition of Canonical’s cloud archive, installing OpenStack using those packages,” said Mark Shuttleworth on his blog.

As we also said last week, Ubuntu is now running inside the most powerful supercomputer in the world, in China, which is called Tienhe2. This “monster” runs on Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi co-processors, and a 160Gb per second interconnect for super-fast data transfer between nodes. It's been the holder of the record for the fastest supercomputer since 2013 and there is no sign that it will be overtaken soon.

The launch of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS a month ago also boosted the use of the operating system in the cloud, and it’s very likely that each new edition will have the same effect.