Canonical Brings Snappy Ubuntu Core OS to Amazon AWS

Delivering on the promise it made when it introduced Snappy earlier this month, Canonical has now extended the new Ubuntu flavor into Amazon Web Services (AMZN), bringing the transactionally updated, container-oriented platform to another major public cloud platform.

Ubuntu already had a well-established presence on AWS, where images of Ubuntu Cloud, a flavor of the open source operating system that is designed for more general-purpose cloud deployments than Snappy Ubuntu Core, have been available for some time.

But Canonical says the integration of the Snappy release—which has been available on the Microsoft (MSFT) Azure cloud, as well as for standalone download, since it debuted a couple of weeks ago—into AWS provides new options for organizations seeking a secure, fast platform that is especially useful for deploying containerized apps, such as Docker.

“The snappy Ubuntu Core approach is faster, more reliable, and provides stronger security guarantees for apps and users,” said Robbie Williamson, vice president of Cloud Engineering at Canonical. “The snappy Ubuntu Core approach is faster, more reliable, and provides stronger security guarantees for apps and users. We’re excited to make Ubuntu Core with snappy packages available on Amazon EC2 and Amazon EC2 Container Service. Ubuntu Core on Amazon EC2 Container Service is a fast way to dive into containers on Ubuntu at scale.”

For now, both the standalone and public-cloud variants of Snappy Ubuntu Core remain available only in beta form. That will remain the case throughout the current Ubuntu development cycle, which concludes in April 2015, according to Canonical.