14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical and Microsoft are long-time partners and they have been working on a number of common projects, and now that partnership has been extended.
OCP Summit is taking place as we speak in San Jose, California, and this is where Canonical chose to demonstrate Metal-as-a-Server (MAAS) deployment solutions, in and OCP. In case you're not familiar with this term, OCP stands for Open Compute Project. This is a project that was initially started by Facebook a few years back in an attempt to improve the energy efficiency of data centers.
The Open Compute Project Foundation is the organization that drives this initiative and it gathers a lot of big names in the industry, including Microsoft. The fact that Canonical has decided to provide support for Microsoft’s OCS hardware is not really a surprise, given the long history of the two companies.
Canonical and Microsoft are making a good team
Just a few weeks ago, the first ever Microsoft Azure hosted service was announced and it's running Ubuntu, which is the distribution built by Canonical. Also, Ubuntu has been working as Metal-as-a-Server (MAAS) deployment solution for quite some time, which made it the perfect choice.
"Canonical is supporting bare-metal provisioning on Microsoft’s OCS hardware with our open source Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) deployment product. This support means Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, SUSE) operating systems, as well as application software on top, can be one-touch provisioned on OCS hardware. At the summit, Canonical is demonstrating how to provision a multi-tier web architecture effectively, including content publishing and database to separate nodes in an OCS chassis. This is the first showcase of automated deployment on OCP hardware, and displays the diverse mindshare OCS is capturing in the industry," reads the official announcement.
Ubuntu has been in the news quite a lot these days. Docker on the Ubuntu Server is now available in the Azure Marketplace and Hadoop is now using predominantly Ubuntu. And the year has just started.