Canonical Extends Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux Support to 10 Years

BERLIN — In a keynote at the OpenStack Summit here, Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical Inc and Ubuntu, detailed the progress made by his Linux distribution in the cloud and announced new extended support.

The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Long Term Support)debutedback on April 26, providing new server and cloud capabilities. An LTS release comes with five year of support, but during his keynote Shuttleworth announced that 18.04 would have support that is available for up to 10 years.

"I'm delighted to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for a full 10 years," Shuttleworth said. "In part because of the very long time horizons in some of industries like financial services and telecommunications but also from IOT where manufacturing lines for example are being deployed that will be in production for at least a decade ."

OpenStack

The long term, stable support for the OpenStack cloud is something that Shuttleworth has committed for some time. In April 2014, the OpenStack Icehouse release came out and it is still being supported by Canonical.

"The OpenStack community is an amazing community and it attracts amazing technology, but that won't be meaningful if it doesn't deliver for everyday businesses," Shuttleworth said. "We actually manage more OpenStack clouds for more different industries, more different architectures than any other company."

Shuttleworth said that when Icehouse was released, he committed to supporting it for five years, because long term support matters.

"What matters isn't day two, what matters is day 1,500," Shuttleworth said. "Living with OpenStack scaling it, upgrading it, growing it, that is important to master to really get the value for your business."

IBM Red Hat

Shuttleworth also provided some color about his views on the $34 billionacquisitionof Red Hat by IBM, which was announced on Oct. 28.

"I wasn't surprised to see Red Hat sell," Shuttleworth said. "But I was surprised at the amount of debt that IBM took on to close the deal."

He added that he would be worried for IBM, except for the fact that the public cloud is a huge opportunity.

"I guess it makes sense if you think of IBM being able to steer a large amount of on prem RHEL workloads to the cloud, then that deal might make sense," he said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at ServerWatch and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.