Canonical has released a consolidated offering for open source infrastructure, called Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure (UA-I), covering its existing services like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Ceph and Swift. The solution offers three levels of support - Essential, Standard and Advanced - with the per-node pricing remaining uniform regardless of the software running on it.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage support service is specifically for Ubuntu Server and Desktop. It covers technical support, access to Canonical’s knowledge base, Landscape - a systems management tool, and legal assurance against "intellectual property infringement claims brought against customers in their use of Ubuntu".
UA-I extends these concepts to infrastructure components like Kubernetes, KVM, OpenStack, and OpenStack storage components - Ceph and Swift. This list also includes Canonical distributions like the Charmed Distribution of Kubernetes and MicroStack. In his recent keynote at the Open Infrastructure Summit (previously known as the OpenStack Summit), Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical Ltd., said that going forward UA-I will support "Kubernetes from Google, Amazon, Azure and VMWare".
Other vendors that support Kubernetes include Red Hat which has a managed Kubernetes solution and Mirantis which has Kubernetes as part of its private cloud software.
UA-I includes long term security updates and regulatory compliance for Linux and base Docker images in the Essential package. FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) and live patches for critical security vulnerabilities form part of it. The next two levels add technical support, long term fixes and legal assurance.
Stephan Fabel, director of product at Canonical, says in an interview with Linux Journal that UA-I’s key differentiator is that customers can use the same service agreement for different infrastructure components. For a given infrastructure component, the supporting technologies are also part of the support agreement. For example, he adds, "in Kubernetes, you would get Jaeger support, Containerd support and the rest of the technologies that are part of a common roll out of Kubernetes".
UA-I includes (PDF) auxiliary services like logging, monitoring and alerting (LMA) based on Prometheus and Grafana.