Ubuntu Pro launches for Google Cloud

Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro is making its debut on another cloud-based service. On Monday, Canonical and Google announced the availability of Ubuntu Pro for all Google Cloud users. A premium version of Ubuntu geared for developers and administrators at enterprises, Ubuntu Pro offers a secure DevOps environment with instant security patching, 10-year support, and compliance for regulated applications and workloads.

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Canonical has offered Ubuntu for Google Cloud since 2014. But the pro version of Ubuntu has also been available on two other major cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Through Ubuntu Pro, cloud users gain a more secure, hardened, and cost-effective environment to drive their cloud adoption and development.

“Enterprise customers are increasingly adopting Google Cloud to run their core business-critical and customer-facing applications,” June Yang, VP and GM for Compute at Google Cloud, said in a press release. “The availability of Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud will offer our enterprise customers the additional security and compliance services needed for their mission-critical workloads.”

Beyond providing the standard Ubuntu features and components, Ubuntu Pro via Google Cloud kicks in several additional services of value to enterprise customers, including:

• Patching of high and critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) across Ubuntu’s vast repository covering more than 30,000 packages, including Node.js, MongoDB, Redis and Apache Kafka.
• Live kernel patching to give virtual machine instances tighter security and greater uptime.
• A 10 year commitment with long-term support for maintenance and security patches. This timeframe applies to Ubuntu Pro 18.04 LTS and higher; the maintenance period for Ubuntu Pro 16.04 LTS is eight years.
• Certified components to support operating environments under compliance regulations such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR and ISO.
• Several features slated for the second half of 2020, such as certified FIPS 140-2 components, a security dashboard for Security Command Center and Managed Apps.

“We needed more time to comprehensively test and migrate our Ubuntu 16.04 LTS workloads to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which would mean stretching beyond the standard maintenance timelines for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS,” Kartik Gupta, engineering manager for CI/CD & FinOps at tech company Gojek, said in a press release. “With Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud, we now can postpone this, and in moving our 16.04 workloads to Ubuntu Pro, we benefit from its live kernel patching and improved security coverage for our key open source components.”

Google Cloud customers can purchase Ubuntu Pro directly through the GCP Console or through Google Cloud Marketplace. The total cost includes the licensing fee of running premium Ubuntu Pro images as well as the regular expense of running the virtual machine.

The overall license expense is a combination of the cost for RAM per GB per hour plus the cost for virtual CPU per hour. Running Ubuntu Pro will be 3% to 4.5% of your average computing cost, according to Google, which means the more computing resources you consume, the smaller the percentage you pay for Ubuntu Pro.

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