Ubuntu on AWS gets improved performance using AWS-tuned kernel

Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Canonical - the team behind Ubuntu - have been working together to deliver the best experience of Ubuntu cloud flavor on AWS, world's most popular public cloud. Ubuntu cloud images are available on AWS for years and it is under the hood platform of majority of AWS services like EC2 Quickstart, Marketplace or Lightinstall. In addition to this collaboration, this week Canonical has announced availability of a custom tuned Linux Kernel to provide optimal performance on AWS platforms.

According to the official sources, as per 29th of March 2017, Ubuntu cloud images for AWS comes with AWS-tuned Kernel by default. Which means, any Ubuntu cloud image brought up using EC2 Quickstart or Marketplace on or after 29th March 2017 will be having performance tuned Kernel by default. These customized kernels will be supported till the support period of Ubuntu 16.04.x LTS release ends.

Some of the notable highlights of AWS tuned Ubuntu Kernels includes:

• Up to 30% faster kernel boot speeds, on a 15% smaller kernel package
• Full support for Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), including the latest driver version 1.1.2, supporting up to 20 Gbps network speeds for ENA instance types (currently I3, P2, R4, X1, and m4.16xlarge)
• Improved i3 instance class support with NVMe storage disks under high IO load
• Increased I/O performance for i3 instances
• Improved instance initialization with NVMe backed storage disks
• Disabled CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL to eliminate deadlocks on some instance types
• Resolved CPU throttling with AWS t2.micro instances

For more details, see original announcement published in Ubuntu Insights blog.

OwnCloud 9.0 Released, the biggest release so far.

The ownCloud team announced release of ownCloud 9.0, latest stable release of open source client-server suite for creating file hosting services. This release of ownCloud marks biggest release in it's history.

ownCloud 9.0 comes with several performance improvements, bug fixes and new features. Collaboration with CERN and AARNET is also something that is important about this release.

From a release announcement:

It is one of the main goals of ownCloud, since the beginning, to enable everyone to run their own server but still collaborate and share with others. Sharing between different ownCloud servers is possible for a while now. But this is easier than ever with cross-server user name auto complete, trusted servers and more. Once you’ve shared with another ownCloud server, it will be added as a trusted server, exchanging user names. This will enable ownCloud to auto complete names from users of all shared servers. Admins have control over these features, so they can add trusted servers manually and disable the automatic addition.

We released the ownCloud Federation API last summer as a first draft. Since then we collected a lot of feedback and improved the specification. I’m super happy that other projects and cloud software started to adopt this API to become compatible.

See complete news in Frank Karlitsches's blog.

10 Reasons for Ubuntu's popularity in cloud platforms

Ubuntu is one of the widely used multi platform supported open source operating system. It has made significant impact in platforms like mobiles, tablets, pc's, laptops, servers ..etc.

An article published in Forbes magazine looks into the reasons, that made Ubuntu a popular operating system in cloud platforms.

Microsoft MSFT -0.12% might have set an ambitious goal of pushing Windows 10 to 1 billion devices. But one OS that is doing wonders in the cloud, desktop, mobile, and IoT segment is Ubuntu. This Debian-based open source OS has been on a roll ever since IaaS has become mainstream to run server workloads in the cloud. From AWS to OpenStack, Ubuntu is most preferred OS by system administrators and DevOps professionals.

Read complete article in Forbes magazine.

SaaS, CaaS & DevOps : Future of Cloud in 2016

The Cloud service is one of the fastest growing technology in these days. It helps people to have scalable, reliable network solutions for an affordable cost. The cbronline portal has published an article which is trying to predict future of cloud in 2016.

Dave Wright, CEO of SolidFire: "The growth of hyperscale cloud vendors like Amazon and Microsoft, will continue to put pressure on the market giants in 2016, causing them to realise that they need to radically reshape themselves to survive.

There are several key trends transforming modern Enterprise IT including public cloud and flash, and the pressure from these shifts is only going to increase in 2016.

"Any large IT vendor that doesn't derive a meaningful amount of its revenue from the public cloud in 2016 is going to be left behind. Similarly, enterprises that have had their first taste of flash are now hungry for more, and are looking to move it from the fringe to the data centre core."

Read complete article in cbronline portal.

Red Hat Introduces container-based OpenShift Enterprise 3 cloud

Red Hat's new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, the OpenShift Enterprise 3 is based on Docker containers, Kubernetes orchestration and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7. It seems that Red Hat has understood that the future of cloud belongs to containers like Docker.

OpenShift Enterprise 3 is designed to deliver a container-based application platform that will provide a secure, efficient way to develop, deploy and run application services. It will do this in part by giving OpenShift users access to certified safe containers from the new Red Hat Container Certification Program.

For enterprises that want to use containers in a really big -- read data-center -- way, OpenShift Enterprise 3 also includes Kubernetes. This is Google's web-scale, open-source, container orchestration and management engine. Every Google program, every search you make with Google, is done using Kubernetes

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