Shuttleworth gets cloudy with Ubuntu 9.10
Karmic Koala
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, has christened the next iteration of its Linux distro. It's called the Karmic Koala, and he says that the future release, due in October as Ubuntu 9.10, will have features that allow companies to build their own compute clouds.
The announcement of the future release was posted to the Ubuntu development list, as is traditional, and Shuttleworth gave a sneak peak at a few upcoming features.
On the server front, the support for cloud computing is going to be one of the key features in the Karmic Koala release. "A good Koala knows how to see the wood for the trees, even when her head is in the clouds," Shuttleworth said in the list posting.
"Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the APIs of Amazon EC2 and making it easy for anybody to setup their own cloud using entirely open tools. We're currently in beta with official Ubuntu base AMIs for use on Amazon EC2. During the Karmic cycle we want to make it easy to deploy applications into the cloud, with ready-to-run appliances or by quickly assembling a custom image."
AMI is short for Amazon Machine Image, and it is basically a rev of an operating system and software stack that can be deployed atop the Xen hypervisor used by Amazon for the EC2 cloud and its related storage services.
Ubuntu 9.10 is not only going to make it easier to deploy Ubuntu on the Amazon EC2 cloud, but will also tap a set of open source cloud management tools, appropriately called Eucalyptus, that are being developed at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
"It's no coincidence that Eucalyptus has just been uploaded to universe and will be part of Jaunty - during the Karmic cycle we expect to make those clouds dance, with dynamically growing and shrinking resource allocations depending on your needs," Shuttleworth explained.
"A savvy Koala knows that the best way to conserve energy is to go to sleep, and these days even servers can suspend and resume, so imagine if we could make it possible to build a cloud computing facility that drops its energy use virtually to zero by napping in the midday heat, and waking up when there's work to be done. No need to drink at the energy fountain when there's nothing going on. If we get all of this right, our Koala will help take the edge off the bear market."
Which sounds more like a bedtime story than release notes, but then again, these aren't release notes. Jaunty, of course, refers to the impending "Jaunty Jackalope" Ubuntu 9.04 release, of which the fourth alpha release came out on February 5. Ubuntu 9.04 is expected to be ready for production on April 22.
Shuttleworth admitted to that his cloud speak sounded "open" and "nebulous," and he said that the feature set for clouding computing for Ubuntu 9.10 would be hammered out the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, which runs from May 25 through 29.
The Eucalyptus project is actually an acronym that stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, which explains why UCSB should be banned from naming anything for at least five years.
The university has set up a public cloud that lets people kick it around, and the project seeks to create an open - and open source - framework that will manage private clouds (like the ones Shuttleworth wants people to build using Ubuntu) and slices of public ones like Amazon's EC2 in a seamless and transparent manner. You can read more about the project here (PDF).
As for the desktop variant, the Ubuntu team is trying to get Linux to boot faster and will continue in these efforts with Ubuntu 9.10. Shuttleworth said that the goal is to get a netbook running Januty to boot up in 25 seconds, and he wants to improve upon this with the Koala desktop. He added that the Ubuntu MID Edition would include all the latest enhancements from the Moblin project, which is an Intel-sponsored project that has created a variant of Linux optimized for netbooks and other mobile Internet devices (that's the MID part) based on Intel's own Atom processors. ®
COMMENTS
Ubuntu clusters
I cant wait to see how this works out.
Its obvious that things cant go on the way they are, what with school having to pay so much towards their IT budgets (I'd prefer they spent the money on REAL things like facilities, buildings, heating, and teachers salaries).
Ubuntu is the only OS on my own PC, and those of many of my friends who are not very tech minded. Keep up the good work Mr Shuttleworh!
@censored
sorry to hear it didn't work. you could try
sudo nvidia-settings
if you have an nvidia board.
i agree with you actually. it does take a bit of dicking around to fix a broken x-server sometimes.
some hardware / hardware combinations just dont work sometimes. I have ubuntu on 2 machines, on my desktop its a pain in the arse to configure because of various hardware and driver issues, but on my laptop with its mobillity radeon hd24-something graphics and all intel sound / network etc, it works beautifully, even got half life 2 running on it.
regardless, its always improving, im sure given a few improvements / new releases in the future one of them will "just work" for you. and tbh iphones are sooo proprietry and locked down that its propbably illegal to get one working with linux in the first place :)
however someone will probably do it even without the 'jailbreaking' part - that prediction being dependant on enough linux experts owning iphones :)
At the end of the day, if its worth £300 / [insert pctax figure for your machine here] / breaking the law (pirating) to you to get your iphone sync'd up with your pc, windows fits the bill. otherwise, ubuntu rules \m/
one more point i wanted to make - if windows didn't make such a big thing about wiping the user's arse for them at every turn, then IMHO windows users would be alot better at configuring things and using the CLI, and so could probably sort out something as technical as a broken x server.
the problem here is balance between control and ease of use - in microshaft's latest incarnation of windows, you have no control. every measure is taken to prevent the user from doing anything but use the system, and we have to just trust that the os does everything it should do, and "just works". when it doesnt, you are screwed unless you want to part with more hard earned cash, or attempt a reinstall (subject to legal conditions as set out in the eula).
with linux, we have absolute control. yes linux refuses to go around wiping people's arses, but with good reason. they should'nt be so damn lazy. and if it did, it would soon be out of toilet roll.
armed with the linux forums and the abillity to fix things rather than reinstall or give up, i find the linux desktop environment to be unbeatable.
no trolling intended :)
Re: @tardigrade
"Actually boxes I've setup look drop dead and work pretty well, that's not the point I'm making at all - its the fact that it needs to be done, on a supposed consumer desktop.I don't like Macs simply because they are closed and overpriced, not because they aren't functional, usable or attractive."
Need to give it a bit more time. Ubuntu's doing pretty well for it's 4th year. Consider the fact that 2 years or even 1 year ago we wouldn't be having this conversation because Linux was in no way ready for the desktop market then. It's moved pretty far in a short time, from the days when trying to run RedHat 6 on the desktop was enough to make you come out in hives.
Happily it looks like Canonical are going to throw a bag of spare change at the GUI in the next couple of releases, which I will look forward too. I don't think they will be paying to include Lucinda Grande as a system font, (just tried it very nice) but Bitstream Vera Sans is pretty damn close to it. Just needs tweaking.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Data control in the cloud
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
