14 DAY TRIAL // AT&T chose Canonical and Ubuntu to power its network and cloud, making this one of the most important collaborations for the creators of the Linux distribution.
The fact that AT&T chose Ubuntu is not all that surprising because Ubuntu has been making a killing in the cloud and it’s becoming the biggest platform out there, especially on OpenStack.
This has to be one of the biggest contracts for Canonical because they will provide support for Ubuntu for all of AT&T’s cloud, network and enterprise applications. I don’t have to remind you just how big AT&T really is. It’s also likely that other companies will choose to make the same choice since Ubuntu is becoming almost synonymous with the cloud.
It will take a long time
Since AT&T is a really big company, it will probably take some time until this transition is ready, so we’ll probably be hearing more about them and their collaboration.
“We’re reinventing how we scale by becoming simpler and modular, similar to how applications have evolved in cloud data centers. Open source and OpenStack innovations represent a unique opportunity to meet these requirements and Canonical’s cloud, and open source expertise make them a good choice for AT&T,” said Toby Ford, assistant vice president of Cloud Technology, Strategy and Planning at AT&T.
Ubuntu is by far the most popular Linux distribution for OpenStack and 80% of the large-scale OpenStack deployments are using this OS. Ubuntu is also a large player on the Amazon and Microsoft’s Azure. In fact, Microsoft even provides some limited Linux support for Ubuntu on Azure.
Canonical seems to be doing pretty much everything with Ubuntu for the cloud, for servers, for IoT devices, for desktops, and for mobile devices. The unification of most of these platforms are helping them advance, and we can only hope that all of this success will keep them grounded so they don’t forget the regular users.