Canonical introduces Ubuntu Pro with up to ten years of support for AWS

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Canonical announced yesterday that it will provide Amazon with an Ubuntu Pro image for Amazon Web Services (AWS). This new image is available through the AWS Marketplace and covers Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS, and 18.04 LTS versions. Enterprises only need to select and run the image on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to use it. Because Ubuntu Pro is a cloud-oriented product, it will provide additional features for cloud-based enterprise deployments on top of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Kernel Patch

The main features of Ubuntu Pro are as follows:

  • 10 years of package updates and security maintenance*
  • Kernel Livepatch, which allows for continuous security patching and higher uptime and availability by allowing kernel security updates to be applied without a reboot**
  • Customised FIPS and Common Criteria EAL-compliant components for use in environments under compliance regimes such as FedRAMP, PCI, HIPAA and ISO
  • Patch coverage for Ubuntu’s infrastructure and application repositories, spanning hundreds of open source workloads including Apache Kafka, MongoDB, Node.js, RabbitMQ, Redis and more.
  • Integration with AWS security and compliance features, including AWS Security Hub, AWS CloudTrail and more — available from Q1 2020.

One last thing to note is that the ten-year maintenance period does not apply to anyone’s version. Only Ubuntu 18.04 LTS has 10 years of maintenance time, and 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS have 8 years of maintenance time. In addition, certification for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is ongoing and will be available in the first quarter of 2020. Certified components and kernel live patches are not available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

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