We’re excited to announce our participation in Space Tech Expo 2024, which will take place from May 14 to 15 in Long Beach, California. As our collaboration with Space agencies strengthens, we’re looking forward to meeting our partners and customers on-site to discuss the critical topics for 2024: cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and open-source innovation.

AI/ML Solutions in Space 

Space organizations invest heavily in AI, aiming to make interstellar travel successful. Agencies kickstart initiatives with different use cases in mind, such as mission planning, autonomous decision-making, resource optimization, and space debris control looking for tooling that enables them to run AI at scale. 

Unlocking real-time space tracking with AI/ML supercomputing

Just recently we worked with the University of Tasmania and Firmus to unlock real-time space tracking with AI/ML supercomputing. 

The University of Tasmania (UTAS) is among the leading providers of space tracking in the southern hemisphere.  The number of new satellites entering the Earth’s orbit is increasing at a near-exponential rate, exceeding 10% growth per year as of 2022, so the university’s work is critical. However, traditional CPU-based data processing had led to a bottleneck that prevented comprehensive, real-time object monitoring. 

What UTAS needed was a modernised infrastructure that could support its immense data processing requirements without drastically inflating costs. The university’s solution was to migrate its space tracking software to Supercloud – a cost-effective and highly sustainable supercomputing platform from Firmus, built using Canonical OpenStack and Canonical Kubernetes, and capable of supporting the most data-intensive AI/ML workloads. 

With Firmus supercomputing based on Canonical infrastructure, UTAS has successfully solved its data processing bottleneck. It has also positioned itself to be able to take advantage of additional MLOps tooling, such as Charmed Kubeflow, that can run on top of Canonical Kubernetes to further simplify AI/ML workflows.

“The UTAS project will help fill the global shortfall in space tracking coverage, and will improve the safety of orbital infrastructure and secure the future of space missions. We are pleased to play our part by contributing Firmus compute resources to support much needed real-time space tracking”. — Peter Blain, Director of Product & AI, Firmus

Explore the case study here. 

To provide the most complete AI solutions to Space agencies, we’ve partnered with the leading hardware, silicon and cloud providers, such as NVIDIA, DELL, AWS, Google Cloud, HPE, Intel, Azure and more. 

Sending the artwork to the International Space Station 

 In 2022, we teamed up with Lonestar to send artwork to the ISS. The artwork is part of a global STEAM initiative and a groundbreaking, immutable data storage, edge processing demonstration currently running aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and led by stealth start-up Lonestar, open-source leader Canonical, and leading space mission integrator Redwire Corporation, a leader in space infrastructure for the next generation space economy. 

Read the full story here. 

Cybersecurity with Ubuntu Pro

Open source technology has been used in space technology for years and it is no surprise that cybersecurity is a key concern for the industry. With our commitment towards securing open source, last year, we announced the general availability of Ubuntu Pro subscription.

It secures an organisation’s Linux estate from OS to the application level. Pro is available on-prem, in the cloud and air-gapped environments, automating security patching, auditing, access management and compliance. Ubuntu Pro delivers FIPS compliance and automation for security standards such as DISA’s Ubuntu STIG, and CIS hardening via the Ubuntu Security Guide (USG).

One of the growing concerns for 2024 is application security. Many open-source packages for applications and toolchains exist in a space with no guarantee or SLA for security patching. With Ubuntu Pro, we secure over 23,000 + open source applications.

If the topic sounds interesting to you, schedule a meeting with our Federal Director Kelley Riggs, for an in-person discussion at Space Tech Expo. 

New subscription for IoT deployments brings security and long term compliance to the most advanced open source stack 

Nuremberg, Germany. 9 April 2024. Today, Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announced the launch of Ubuntu Pro for Devices – a comprehensive offering that simplifies security and compliance for IoT device deployments. Ubuntu Pro for Devices provides 10 years of security maintenance for Ubuntu and thousands of open source packages, such as Python, Docker, OpenJDK, OpenCV, MQTT, OpenSSL, Go, and Robot Operating System (ROS).  The subscription also provides device management capabilities through Landscape, Canonical’s systems management tool, and access to Real-time Ubuntu for latency-critical use cases.  Ubuntu Pro for Devices is available directly from Canonical, and from a wide range of original device manufacturers (ODMs) in Canonical’s partner ecosystem, including ADLINK, AAEON, Advantech and DFI.

With this launch, Canonical is expanding its collaboration with ODMs as demand for open source security and compliance grows in the embedded space.  Ubuntu Pro for Devices can be combined with  Canonical’s existing Ubuntu Certified Hardware programme to offer a best in class Ubuntu experience on devices out-of-the-box and for up to 10 years.

A secure open source supply chain

Today, most application stacks contain open source software, but companies don’t always have the in-house expertise to secure and support their full stack. Canonical patches over 1,000 CVEs each year and provides a 10 year security maintenance commitment for popular toolchains like Python and Go, as well as commonly-used IoT software frameworks like ROS. Companies can consume secure and maintained open source with the same set of guarantees from the same vendor. 

“As new legislation is introduced for IoT embedded devices, it is crucial that our customers have a means to securely maintain the operating system along with commonly used applications and dependencies”, said Ethan Chen, General Manager of the Edge Computing Platforms BU at ADLINK. “Ubuntu Pro ensures that IoT devices receive reliable security patches from a trusted source”.

Streamlined compliance

The regulatory landscape is evolving, with the EU Cyber Resilience Act and the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark resulting in a growing need for reliable, long-term access to software security fixes. Ubuntu Pro provides access to critical vulnerability fixes for most of the open source packages enterprises use, providing security coverage for developers and peace of mind for CISOs. 

“Many of our customers from across different sectors are using computer vision software that requires regulatory approval. In particular, the latest US regulation makes it important to provide timely CVE fixes for all of the components used in our products. Thanks to Ubuntu Pro for Devices, this is now covered”, said Jason Huang, Director of AAEON’s UP Division.

Ubuntu Pro for Devices offers more than security patching. It also provides certified modules and hardening profiles that enable organisations to achieve compliance with standards such as FIPS, HIPAA, PCI-DSS and others. 

“Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution. Many of our public sector customers in the US need FIPS compliance, and Ubuntu Pro for Devices is a perfect solution for them”, said Joe Chen, Director at Advantech.

Cost-effective and convenient fleet management

Remote device management is critical for IoT, as a lot of devices are physically inaccessible. Ubuntu Pro for Devices includes device management with Landscape, which automates security patching and audits across Ubuntu estates. Landscape allows administrators to manage their Ubuntu instances from a single portal. They can securely authenticate and add new devices to their IoT fleet, manage software versions and configurations, and monitor device performance and compliance.  By grouping multiple devices together, administrators can perform these operations on numerous devices simultaneously, saving both time and effort.

 “DFI leverages virtualisation technology to introduce a robust Workload Consolidation platform integrated with our embedded solutions for EV charging stations and other cutting-edge industrial applications.  With the ability to use Landscape to manage devices built with DFI boards, we can now provide more reliable solutions to our customers with 10 years of security updates and streamlined fleet maintenance”, said Jarry Chang, DFI Product Center General Manager.

Learn more

Download our datasheet to learn about the capabilities offered in Ubuntu Pro for Devices. 

To discuss your use case, contact Canonical or stop by our booth [4-354, Hall 4] at Embedded World in Nuremberg this week. 

We’re excited to announce our participation in NLIT 2024. As our collaboration with the Department of Energy (DOE) is strengthening, we’re looking forward to meeting our partners and customers on-site to discuss the critical topics for 2024: Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence and open-source innovation.

AI/ML Solutions for the DOE 

The public sector, including DOE, invests heavily in AI, aiming to develop predictive algorithms for some of the most cutting-edge research. Agencies kickstart initiatives with different use cases in mind, such as predicting weather patterns, power plant maintenance, and collecting and processing carbon data, looking for tooling that enables them to run AI at scale. 

Secure your AI stack 

We understand the difficulty of ensuring compliance and security while building AI applications and models at scale. We secure and maintain the widest open-source software library and solutions like Charmed Kubeflow, MLFlow, Spark and Kafka with reliable security patching and up to 10 years of support. We simplify the AI journey with an integrated and secure stack. 

Kubeflow, for example, helps professionals focus on the development and deployment of machine learning models, offering security patching, user management and a wide range of integrations on top of any Kubernetes. 

Read more about AI in public sector

To provide the most complete AI solutions to DOE, we’ve partnered with the leading hardware, silicon and cloud providers, such as NVIDIA, DELL, AWS, Google Cloud, HPE, Intel, Azure and more. 

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS – Powering Diverse Computing Environments with Security and Intelligence

Join us for an excerpt discussion on April 9th at 4:30 PM in Room #618.

This session explores the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, showcasing its roles from powering edge devices to orchestrating core high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. We will explore Ubuntu’s seamless integration across the computing landscape, highlighting its capacity to support diverse and secure systems. 

We speak about Ubuntu’s newly available Confidential Computing integrations, a crucial feature for protecting guest workloads in cloud and on-premise environments against unauthorized access. We will also discuss defense-in-depth best practices for security hardening any Canonical solutions like FIPS/STIG/CIS Benchmarks.

Finally, we will present Ubuntu’s comprehensive, open-source MLOps solution, designed to accelerate the deployment of AI models from experimentation to production. Attendees will gain a holistic understanding of how Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is shaping the future of computing with secure, scalable, and intelligent computing.

Cybersecurity with Ubuntu Pro

With our commitment towards securing open source, last year, we announced the general availability of Ubuntu Pro subscription. It secures an organisation’s Linux estate from OS to the application level. Pro is available on-prem, in the cloud and air-gapped environments, automating security patching, auditing, access management and compliance. Ubuntu Pro delivers FIPS compliance and automation for security standards such as DISA’s Ubuntu STIG, and CIS hardening via the Ubuntu Security Guide (USG).

One of the growing concerns for 2024 is application security. Many open-source packages for applications and toolchains exist in a space with no guarantee or SLA for security patching. With Ubuntu Pro, we secure over 23,000 + open source applications.

Schedule a meeting with our Federal  Directors, Devin Breen and Kelley Riggs, for an in-person discussion or a demo!

DEMOS

At NLIT, our Field Software Engineer Ethan Myers will showcase a few of Canonical’s software products, including Landscape, Kubeflow, and Microcloud.

Landscape is a systems management tool for Ubuntu. It automates security patching, auditing, access management, and compliance tasks across your Ubuntu estate. Use it in well-connected or airgapped environments: at sea, in space, and everywhere in between.

Kubeflow is an open-source machine learning toolkit based on Kubernetes. It gives data scientists the tools they need to develop, test, and deploy machine learning models to production on top of Kubernetes.

MicroCloud – an easy-to-deploy, highly available cloud suitable for private clouds, edge compute, and as an high-power eddev/test test environment. MicroClouds offer virtualization and containerization (LXD), distributed storage (Ceph) and software-defined networking (OVN), all wrapped up in a simple deployment and easy-to-use web interface.

Schedule a meeting or in-person demo

Schedule a meeting with our Federal Directors  Kelley Riggs and Devin Breen for an in-person discussion or a demo!

Ubuntu’s long-term support releases just got even longer, with Canonical today announcing they are eligible for up to 12 years of security coverage from initial release. As you know, every Ubuntu LTS release receives 5 years of standard security (and select application) updates out of the gate. This covers packages in the ‘main’ Ubuntu repo. Subscribing to Ubuntu Pro adds a further 5 years of security coverage for packages in both ‘main’ and ‘universe’. Now there’s Legacy Support, a purchasable add-on for Ubuntu Pro customers. This offers an additional 2 years of coverage, bringing the total LTS support period up […]

You're reading Canonical Bumps LTS Support to 12 Years (For a Fee), a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.

In December 2023, Canonical joined the Sylva project of Linux Foundation Europe to provide fully open-source and upstream telco platform solutions to the project. Sylva aims to tackle the fragmentation in telco cloud technologies and the vendor lock-in caused by proprietary platform solutions, by defining a common validation software framework for telco core and edge clouds. This framework captures the latest set of technical requirements from operators when running telco software workloads as cloud native functions (CNF), such as 5G core microservices and Open RAN software.

Sylva’s mission is to support 5G actors in their efforts to drive convergence of cloud technologies in the telco industry – taking into account interoperability across 5G components, TCO with open source software, compliance with regulations and adherence to high security standards. CNFs from vendor companies can then be operated and validated on reference implementations of the cloud software framework defined by Sylva. 

To test and validate telco vendor CNFs, Sylva has deployed cloud-native platforms based on a multi-deployment model as Kubernetes (K8s) clusters on bare metal or OpenStack. These CNFs often require telco-grade enhanced platform features like SR-IOV, DPDK, NUMA, and Hugepages, along with support for a range of container networking interfaces (CNI). In this blog, we explain how Canonical’s Sylva-compliant infrastructure solutions satisfy these requirements.

Canonical’s open source platform solutions for Sylva

Canonical’s product portfolio is closely aligned with Sylva’s objectives and strategies. It provides a variety of features that Sylva aims to include in the latest modern telecom infrastructure deployments. The project has already deployed validation platforms running on Ubuntu, and also leverages hardened Ubuntu 22.04 images.

Canonical Kubernetes is a CNCF conformant enterprise-grade Kubernetes with high-availability. It delivers the latest pure upstream Kubernetes, which has been fully tested across a variety of cloud platforms of all form factors, including provisioned bare metal systems, Equinix Metal and OpenStack, and architectures including x86, ARM, IBM POWER and IBM Z. It supports the Cluster API (CAPI), which is mandated by Sylva to provision Kubernetes. With CAPI, an operator can update Kubernetes clusters through rolling upgrades without disruption and initialise their workloads. 

For telco edge clouds, Canonical Kubernetes can scale as a lightweight Kubernetes solution with self-healing, high-availability and easy clustering properties. This provides a minimal footprint for more energy-efficient operations at edge clouds. It can equivalently scale up at regional and central clouds where a larger footprint is needed in a data centre. 

Based on Canonical Kubernetes, Canonical’s Cloud Native Execution Platform (CNEP) aligns with the Sylva platform features and architectural design. With CNEP, Kubernetes clusters are offered to telco operators on bare metal hardware, where hardware provisioning and cluster operations can both be controlled and orchestrated via Cluster API centrally. 

CNEP’s set of supported features makes it ideal for operators who want to adopt a Sylva compliant platform with validated telco CNFs from vendors, e.g. 5G core and Open RAN as well as MEC CNFs, such as content delivery networking (CDN) software. The platform software stack fully supports the Sylva design from bare metal to containers, with capabilities including:

• Bare metal provisioning operations automated via Cluster API
• Enhanced platform awareness features, such as SR-IOV, DPDK, CPU pinning, Hugepages and NUMA
• Ubuntu operating system with CIS security hardening, compliant with FIPS, NIST 800-53, PCI DSS, DISA STIG, ISO 270001 standards
• A real-time kernel for mission-critical applications and latency-sensitive telco workloads, such as Open RAN DU and 5G UPF
• Fully upstream and CNCF-compliant Canonical Kubernetes that provides operators with an industry-standard and production-grade Kubernetes container orchestration platform with multi-tenancy features, exposing Cluster API
• A wide range of CNIs, required by vendor CNFs and the Sylva validation framework, such as Cilium, Calico, Multus, and others
• Ceph as a backbone for distributed multi-tenant storage with configurable data protection and encryption
• Full observability, with support for the Canonical Observability Stack, consisting of popular open source software tools Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki, supporting logging, monitoring and alerting
• Role based access control (RBAC) features at platform, Kubernetes and bare metal provisioning levels

In addition to Canonical Kubernetes and our CNEP solution, Canonical OpenStack supports the advanced platform features that Sylva validation platforms need, including SR-IOV, DPDK, CPU-pinning, NUMA, Hugepages, PCI passthrough, and NVIDIA GPUs with virtualisation. It has native support for both Ceph and Cinder as storage components, both of which are included in the Sylva platform design and roadmap.

About the Sylva project 

Aligned with telco operator needs, Sylva envisions cloud-native telco software execution on Kubernetes platforms. Operators look to deploy Kubernetes clusters at their telco edge, regional and core clouds, providing them with a uniform cloud-native execution environment.

Modern telco infrastructure is distributed, deployed across multiple locations with tens of thousands of far-edge clouds, thousands of near-edge clouds and tens of regional clouds. This calls for deploying and managing a large number of Kubernetes workload clusters at geographically dispersed locations, controlled by management cluster(s) located at regional and central clouds. To tackle this challenge, Sylva has defined a software framework for telecom software platforms based on Kubernetes that are deployed on a large scale. 

Modern telco clouds must also support a set of enhanced platform features often required by telco CNFs. Towards this, the project’s validation platforms verify that (i) the deployment platform supports the requirements of a CNF in test, and (ii) the CNF can correctly deploy on the platform and successfully consume these platform features.

Kubernetes cluster management

Sylva follows a declarative approach with a GitOps framework to manage a high volume of physical nodes and Kubernetes clusters. Infrastructure lifecycle management covers Day 0 (build and deploy), Day 1(run), Day 2(operate) operations, with fault management, updates and upgrades. The project provides automation with CI/CD pipelines where a set of scripts produce and maintain Helm charts that include Kubernetes deployment and operational resource definitions. 

A dedicated work group, called Telco Cloud Stack, has developed tooling for cluster deployment and lifecycle management (LCM). This tooling is based on the Flux GitOps tool, which keeps clusters and infrastructure components in sync with their definitions in Git repositories. 

To manage the Kubernetes clusters and bare metal provisioning with this tool-chain, Sylva leverages Cluster API (CAPI).

Validation of telco CNFs on Sylva platforms

CNFs from different vendors are validated on Sylva platforms for the interoperability between the CNFs and the platforms. The project’s validation program ensures that telco operators who deploy platforms with software components that follow the Sylva reference implementations gain two benefits: (i) verified telco CNF functionality on their cloud platforms, and (ii) verified support for the telco-grade platform features which these CNFs require.

The project has a dedicated work group called the Sylva Validation Center, which tests deployment of vendor CNFs on the project’s validation platforms, where Kubernetes runs on either bare metal hardware or on OpenStack. 

The validation of a CNF under test on a Sylva platform starts with identifying the necessary set of platform capabilities that the CNF requires, including CNIs, and then installing and configuring the platform with those capabilities. Once the platform has been configured, a first set of smoke tests are run to verify the platform’s support for this set of features. Once the CNF has been deployed on the platform, some functional tests are performed to verify that the deployment is correctly done, and all the necessary Kubernetes pods are healthy in ready state. Finally, operators may run additional tests on CNFs if deemed necessary.

Canonical’s open source software and solutions meet the platform feature requirements by telco CNFs as tested by the Sylva Validation Center, such as SR-IOV, Multus CNI, and Real-time Linux. Validating telco CNFs on Canonical’s platforms for Sylva will also ensure that our platforms with support for these advanced features are verified by Sylva to run these CNFs.

Sylva platform roadmap

In its roadmap for 2024, project Sylva is planning to add support for new features in its validation platforms, such as near real-time Linux, immutable operating system for far-edge clouds and GPU offloads. Canonical’s software platforms follow Sylva’s vision and have support for these features already today, with Real-time Ubuntu, Ubuntu Core immutable OS, support for precision time protocol (PTP) and more.

Canonical is committed to making Sylva a benchmark platform for executing telco network functions. This commitment entails Canonical’s contribution to the infrastructure-as-code scripts that compose Sylva, to enable our open source solutions for Sylva, and to align with the evolving technical scope of the project.

Summary

Linux Foundation Europe’s Sylva project has defined a platform architecture for validating cloud-native telco network functions on Kubernetes. This provides telco operators with guidance on how to achieve a uniform cloud infrastructure, covering edge, regional and central cloud locations, ultimately aiming at multiple objectives, including cost reduction, interoperability, automation, compliance and security.

The project emphasises the central role of open source platforms with standard and open APIs, which brings a modular approach when designing and deploying telco cloud systems. 

Canonical offers fully upstream and telco-grade open source solutions that align with the Sylva platform architecture, including Canonical Kubernetes and Canonical OpenStack. We also engineered an innovative platform solution, CNEP, which is fully inline with the Sylva visions on multi-tenancy, multi-site Kubernetes clusters,  bare metal with full automation of hardware provisioning and cluster lifecycle management performed over industry-standard Cluster API.

Contact us

Canonical provides a full stack for your telecom infrastructure. To learn more about our telco solutions, visit our webpage at ubuntu.com/telco.

Further reading

Canonical joins the Sylva project

Bringing automation to telco edge clouds at scale

Canonical Kubernetes 1.29 is now generally available

Fast and reliable telco edge clouds with Intel FlexRAN and Real-time Ubuntu for 5G URLLC scenarios

Collaboration to benefit communication service providers and business application vendors at the telco edge

Barcelona, Spain. 28 February 2024. Canonical today announced an expansion of its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make Real-time Ubuntu available to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere (Amazon EKS Anywhere) customers for use in Open radio access network (RAN) commercial deployments. With Real-time Ubuntu and Amazon EKS Anywhere, customers can benefit from ultra-reliable low-latency operating system performance and simplified Kubernetes cluster management.

The need for ultra-reliability and low latency in data processing

Open RAN enables distributed deployment of mobile networking software that runs an operator’s RAN across edge clouds, making it possible to bring data processing closer to where devices and end users are located. Low-latency compute at the edge is required due to the stringent real-time processing of RAN workloads. Open RAN software requires agility in packet processing at the operating system level, so that the networking software stack can deliver information with bounded latency levels.

Besides Open RAN system software, business services that are sensitive to time delay, such as factory control systems, enterprise resource planning, and passenger information systems, also require low-latency and reliable communications quality. This means that the time delay in delivering information between a service and the devices that consume that service must be bounded throughout the lifetime of the service. This is necessary for operators to be able to meet application service level agreement (SLA) requirements given to business customers, so they can have the desired quality of experience.

Amazon EKS Anywhere

Amazon EKS Anywhere allows users to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on their own infrastructure. It builds on the strengths of Amazon EKS Distro and provides open source software that’s up to date and patched, so that users can have an on-premises Kubernetes environment that’s more reliable than a self-managed Kubernetes offering. These features make Amazon EKS Anywhere an ideal deployment option to run cloud-native Open RAN functions on Kubernetes at the telco edge.

Real-time Ubuntu

Real-time Ubuntu provides bounded low latency in the Linux kernel to applications that are sensitive to time-delay. By assigning a higher priority to such applications when scheduling system resources, Real-time Ubuntu can guarantee uninterrupted processing of latency-sensitive applications, minimising the time to process them. Real-time processing is an essential feature for telco clouds where Open RAN and edge computing workloads run.

“We are pleased to mark another milestone in our continued collaboration with AWS by bringing real-time data processing, required by advanced Open RAN workloads, on Amazon EKS Anywhere with Real-time Ubuntu,” said Arno Van Huyssteen, CTO of Telco at Canonical. 

“By continuing our joint innovation with AWS to provide cutting-edge capabilities and total cost of ownership benefits, this partnership delivers further value to our shared telecom customers. We take pride in making the most powerful Linux platform on the market accessible to all Amazon EKS Anywhere and Open RAN consumers. Drawing on Ubuntu’s renowned open source prowess and AWS’s cloud services, we strive to satisfy the performance and adaptability required for virtualised RAN and edge computing transformation in telecommunications. Together, we aim to supply the technical bedrock to propel the next wave of advancement.“

Ubuntu with real-time kernel on Amazon EKS Anywhere: A technology enabler for 5G telco edge

By working with AWS, Canonical will make it possible to offer real-time processing capabilities to Amazon EKS Anywhere customers. Operators deploying Open RAN software components, such as distributed unit (DU) and central unit (CU) on Amazon EKS Anywhere platforms can then boost the performance of their radio access networks, and get the benefits of Open RAN.

The technology also opens up the possibility to deliver real-time capabilities to application workloads on Amazon EKS Anywhere platforms, such as 5G industrial applications and location-based services among many others.

Join the discussion at MWC 2024

Canonical’s CTO for Telco, Arno Van Huysteen, will join industry leaders in a panel discussion at MWC 2024. The panel, titled “A roadmap to successful O-RAN deployment on cloud” and hosted by AWS, will take place on 28 February 2024 at 14:00 – 14:30 CET at the Inspiration Zone, Room CC1.4. Join the round-table discussion on how Open RAN on cloud computing systems will play a role in the future of telecommunications.

Learn more about Canonical’s solutions for telco

To learn more about Real-time Ubuntu and how it benefits telecommunication networks and applications, read our blog. If you would like to learn more about the telecommunication services we provide, visit https://ubuntu.com/telco.  

About Canonical

Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, provides open source security, support and services. Our portfolio covers critical systems, from the smallest devices to the largest clouds, from the kernel to containers, from databases to AI. With customers that include top tech brands, emerging startups, governments and home users, Canonical delivers trusted open source for everyone. Learn more at https://canonical.com/.

Paris, France. 14 February 2024. United by a common goal to advance open source software in telecommunications, Firecell and Canonical will demonstrate at this year’s Mobile Wireless Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona, 5G private mobile network (PMN) solutions running on Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system.

Recognising the future of Open RAN in telecommunications, particularly in 5G private mobile networks, Canonical joined the OpenAirInterface (OAI) Community in December 2023. As a member of OAI, Canonical is expanding its telecommunication software portfolio, adding mobile networking software to the set of open source tools and solutions that the company offers to the industry. Canonical also now collaborates with companies such as Firecell to bring secure, trusted and production-grade open source to the Open RAN ecosystem. Firecell offers PMN solutions based on the open source software distributed by OAI for both indoor and outdoor connectivity.

Ubuntu is the de facto industry standard worldwide when running telecom networking software and business application workloads. It provides exactly what the telecom industry needs: production-grade performance and security for telecom software and infrastructure. 

“Canonical’s integration with the OpenAirInterface Community and collaboration with Firecell are set to transform the telecommunications landscape”, said Cédric Gégout, VP of Product Management at Canonical. “Our commitment to deliver robust, secure open source solutions with more than 10-years of support with Ubuntu Pro guarantees production-grade performance and security to all the 5G industries.”

These 10 years of support are available through Ubuntu Pro, the most comprehensive subscription service for software security and compliance in the industry. The Ubuntu Pro subscription also brings real-time processing capabilities to telecom networking software and business applications. With its support for a wide range of enhanced platform awareness (EPA) features, operators can get the performance they need when delivering their services with Ubuntu running across their entire telecom infrastructure, covering devices and radio access networks (RAN) as well as edge and core clouds.

“As the leading provider of integrated and affordable private 5G solutions, Firecell is excited to announce our partnership with Canonical”, declared Claude Seyrat, CEO of Firecell. “This collaboration underscores our dedication to open-source innovation and our belief in its critical role in shaping the future of telecommunications. By pooling our resources together and supporting the OpenAirInterface initiative, we are setting a new standard in the industry. We are not just advocating for change on how telecommunication software must be developed; we are actively driving it, ensuring that open-source becomes the cornerstone of 5G development”.

The OpenAirInterface (OAI) Community is dedicated to developing and distributing software for open radio access networks (Open RAN) and core networks. Their work adheres to the mobile telecommunications networking specifications set by 3GPP, as well as the software interfaces defined by the O-RAN Alliance for Open RAN. The production-grade PMN solutions offered by Firecell and empowered by Ubuntu are another example of the capabilities of open source software on Ubuntu within the telecommunications sector.

Contact us for your telco deployment needs and your transition to open source.

About Canonical

Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, provides open source security, support and services. Our portfolio covers critical systems, from the smallest devices to the largest clouds, from the kernel to containers, from databases to AI. With customers that include top tech brands, emerging startups, governments and home users, Canonical delivers trusted open source for everyone. Learn more at https://canonical.com/

About Firecell

Firecell accelerates companies’ digital transformation by providing seamless and robust connectivity both indoors and outdoors, with a turn-key private 5G network solution. Firecell eliminates the complexity of deploying private 5G networks and reduces the overall network cost to achieve faster ROI for enterprises. Firecell has customers in Europe, the US and Asia. Learn more at https://firecell.io/

Press Contacts

Canonical

Lelanie de Roubaix, Communications Manager
pr@canonical.com

Firecell

Olivier Dhotel, Co-founder
olivier.dhotel@firecell.io

It seems some users aren’t happy that there’s (currently) no way to disable Ubuntu Pro package updates from showing in the Software Updater tool in Ubuntu LTS releases. Last year, Canonical updated update-manager (aka Software Updater) to display a list of Ubuntu Pro package updates available for user systems regardless of whether Ubuntu Pro is enabled or not (and if it’s not, they can’t install them). Prior, only users who explicitly opted-in to Ubuntu Pro would see corresponding package updates available for their systems. Now, everyone sees them. And the inability to opt-out of being asked to opt-in is proving […]

You're reading Ubuntu Pro Packages in ‘Software Updater’ Garner Criticism, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.