14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical is pleased to announce today the new Minimal Ubuntu operating system targeted and optimized for public clouds and Docker Hub.
Engineered to provide both a small footprint and package selection, the new Minimal Ubuntu operating system is designed and optimized for automated use by the masses on public clouds and the Docker Hub, promising to offer users state-of-the-art security, outstanding performance, stability, and reliability at all times.
If you want to use the smallest possible Ubuntu base image for automated cloud operations on public clouds, you need to use the new Minimal Ubuntu operating system, which is more than 50 percent smaller than the standard Ubuntu Server image and offers up to 40 percent faster booting.
"The small footprint of Minimal Ubuntu, when deployed with fast VM provisioning from GCE, helps deliver drastically improved boot times, making them a great choice for developers looking to build their applications on Google Cloud Platform," said Paul Nash, Group Product Manager, Google Cloud.
On top of that, Minimal Ubuntu remains fully compatible with the standard Ubuntu package base, meaning that users will be able to install any package they want from the official Ubuntu repositories and perform any standard Ubuntu operation. Minimal Ubuntu is powered by a KVM-optimised kernel.
Minimal Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS are out now on EC2, GCE, LXD, and OpenStack
Two versions of the new Minimal Ubuntu operating system are currently available to download for various popular public clouds, such as Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine (GCE), on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, as well as on Canonical's LXD pure-container hypervisor, and KVM-based OpenStack solutions.
They are based on the long-term supported Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series, which are supported by Canonical until April 2021 for the Minimal Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base image and April 2023 for the Minimal Ubuntu 18.04 LTS base image.
Also, there's a Docker image available for Minimal Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, which weights only 29MB in size and can be used by developers as a highly-efficient container starting point to deploy multi-cloud containerized apps. It can be used on the Docker Hub for modern Docker workflows alongside Kubernetes.