The 11.10 comes six months after the 11.04 Natty Narwhal release. Among the key new items in 11.04 is a tech preview of the OpenStack open source cloud platform. In the new 11.10 release, Ubuntu has made OpenStack a fully supported technology and is shifting to it as the basis for the Ubuntu Enteprise Cloud (UEC). Previously, Ubuntu leveraged Eucalyptus for UEC. Although Ubuntu is throwing its support behind OpenStack, Baker noted that existing Eucalyptus users can stick with that technology, if they so choose.
Ubuntu’s positioning for the cloud is a key part of the overall strategy for the Linux distribution.
“Since we first produced Ubuntu Server, the strategy has been to try and get it to the point where it becomes the platform for cloud computing,” Mark Baker, Server Product Manager at Canonical told InternetNews.com. “The goal of Ubuntu Server isn’t so much to get into the traditional enterprise datacenter and run traditional workloads; Red Hat and Novell already do a great job of replicating those enterprise stacks from Unix to Linux.”