5 reasons you should only use certified images on the public cloud

Ubuntu has a long history in the cloud. Not only is it the world’s number one platform for deployments of OpenStack (as we’ve covered here), it also runs more public cloud workloads than all other platforms combined. Fast, secure, and proven in the most demanding production environments, it is extremely popular with the likes of Netflix, Waze, Airbnb, Uber, Heroku, and many others. Dustin Kirkland covered it brilliantly in his post last month.

Ubuntu is the choice of developers all over the world, and truly supports scale-out architecture. It is also a fully open-source operating system; in fact anyone can download an image from our public pages and even modify it, as long as it’s for their own use. So why be picky about which images you use on which public cloud?

Two of our values are especially relevant here:

1. Ensuring widespread community usefulness for Ubuntu
2. Building confidence that Ubuntu Just Works

For that, Ubuntu needs to provide a predictable, secure, and reliable user experience. When bad things happen, it can be annoying on your personal desktop, but when your project—and business—depends on reliable infrastructure, things need to run smoothly and efficiently at scale. Whether it’s an unforeseen incompatibility that requires extensive developer resource to fix, or a security vulnerability that’s hampering operations while you wait for a patch, the implications can often be measured in millions of dollars.

Certified images, developed and supported by Canonical, are managed centrally, delivered automatically, with bugs and vulnerabilities fixed fast. Here are the top reasons to ensure your workloads are running on certified images:

1. The best Ubuntu experience at all times, dependable, always up-to-date, and optimised for the leading public clouds
2. Consistency with your development and testing environments
3. Fast issue resolution and bug fixes, with rapid updates and software installation
4. 100% compatible with the cutting-edge Ubuntu cloud toolset, with an option for enterprise-grade Ubuntu Advantage support packages
5. A rich ecosystem of services at your fingertips

An enormous amount of work goes into creating and maintaining certified images, because it’s necessary to ensure that the best Ubuntu experience is available to everyone, through our cloud partners. With a truly stellar engineering team, a cutting-edge tool set and enterprise commercial support available direct from Canonical, there’s no better choice in the cloud.

So if you’re considering using the services of a public cloud provider who currently doesn’t offer Certified Ubuntu images, it’s worth raising the issue with them. Because in today’s competitive cloud world, you need all the advantages you can get.

If you’d like to read more, download our new ebook here.
Download eBook