Certified Ubuntu images available on Google Cloud Platform

Canonical, working with Google, today is launching the public beta of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 12.04 LTS and 14.10 on Google Cloud Platform.

Google Cloud Platform is a collection of cloud services that allows customers to create anything from simple websites to complex applications. Starting today, it is possible to select optimised, up to date, fully secure and consistent Ubuntu images on Google Cloud Platform.

As part of Canonical’s Certified Public Cloud (CPC) programme, Canonical and Google Cloud Platform have worked together to optimise Ubuntu images that ensure the highest-quality cloud experience for our customers. Canonical continually maintains, tests and updates certified Ubuntu images, making the latest versions available on Google Cloud Platform within minutes of them being officially released by Canonical. For all Ubuntu LTS versions, Canonical provides maintenance and security updates for five years.

Server Density delivers server and website monitoring as a fully managed service, delivering significant infrastructure and management savings for its customers. The company’s Founder, David Mytton comments; “Over the last few months, we have been building new product functionality on Google Cloud Platform. We already use Ubuntu exclusively for our existing server infrastructure and are pleased that easy to deploy, fully secure and up to date Ubuntu images will be an option for our cloud environment on Google Cloud Platform too.”

“The lack of official Ubuntu images had been holding us back in migrating portions of our infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform,” says Sebastian Stadil, founder of the leading open source cloud management platform, Scalr. “We are pleased to see Ubuntu technologies be made available to all our enterprise customers.” 

Federico Lucifredi, Certified Public Cloud product manager comments, “As more enterprises join start-ups in turning to public cloud environments to run mission critical and scale-out workloads, Google Cloud Platform has quickly established itself as one of the world’s leading contenders for their business. Bringing Ubuntu to Google Cloud Platform is a logical first step in what we believe will be a great collaboration, benefitting developers and enterprises looking for an easy to use, reliable OS for their cloud deployments.”

Blending PaaS and IaaS services and backed by Google’s unique world-class infrastructure, Google Cloud Platform is an ideal host for those scale-out workloads that so naturally find themselves at home on Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a sustained track record as the world’s guest operating system of choice on all major public clouds, with around 70% of workloads running on Ubuntu. Google Cloud Platform and Canonical have collaborated to ensure that users will get the best user experience, and benefit from additional services like locally deployed mirrors of the Ubuntu Archive, ensuring near-instant download times for new software and security patches.

Google of course needs no introduction, but if you have not been testing their cloud offerings already, this is the perfect time to remedy that oversight. Head over to Google Cloud Platform and see for yourselves how it feels to run Ubuntu on the infrastructure that powers Google’s own services.