Containers are a lightweight, portable, and consistent way to package applications and their dependencies. Containers provide an isolated environment, ensuring an application runs reliably across different environments. Enterprises and tech-savvy individuals are using container technologies because of their benefits. However, container orchestration tools have become necessary to manage clusters with the rise in container usage.

A lot of people, like myself, believe automotive is the most innovative sector today, especially when it comes to software. We are living a critical moment in automotive, where evolution is being pushed onto the market. This rapid software shift is posing challenges that are complicating developers’ progress. Most of these challenges are hardware-related. Gaining access to target development hardware has become an impossible task, the recent global microchip shortage did not help.

Storage and container management systems are almost polar opposites of each other. One deals with permanently storing, and protecting data for as long as it’s needed. The other automatically manages highly dynamic workloads, scaling resources up and down as required. More organisations are taking a container-first approach to application deployment and management, but the underlying challenge of safely and securely storing data still remains the same.

Today, Canonical announced the release of Charmed Spark – an advanced solution for Apache Spark® that provides everything users need to run Apache Spark on Kubernetes. Apache Spark is suitable for use in diverse data processing applications including predictive analytics, data warehousing, machine learning data preparation and extract-transform-load (ETL).

We’re super excited to announce that we have shipped the first release of our solution for big data – Charmed Spark. Charmed Spark packages a supported distribution of Apache Spark and optimises it for deployment to Kubernetes, which is where most of the industry is moving these days.

Open source projects are a testament to the possibilities of collective action. From small libraries to large-scale systems, these projects rely on the volunteer efforts of communities to evolve, improve, and sustain. The principles behind successful open source projects resonate deeply with the divide-and-conquer strategy, a universal approach that has proven effective across multiple disciplines.

The last interim release before an LTS (Long Term Supported release for those new to the Ubuntu terminology) is a particularly exciting time. This is the release where the team aims to land as many major changes as possible to ensure that the community has the chance to take them for a spin and provide feedback for further refinement ahead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. These features span the entire Ubuntu Desktop stack, from the user interface, to software management, to core security and architectural changes.

Today Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed “Mantic Minotaur”, available to download and install from https://ubuntu.com/download. “In this release we’ve raised the bar for what secure by default means for Ubuntu and set the stage for our next Long Term Supported release.” said Oliver Smith, Senior Product Manager for Ubuntu at Canonical.

In our previous blog, we introduced smartNICs as technology enablers for next-generation converged data centres. We covered how smartNICs can increase efficiency and drive return on investment. In this blog post, we explain how this innovative technology can help the telecom industry. SmartNICs use cases for the telecom sector are still emerging. However, when they arrive, it will be big for the sector, especially at edge clouds where speed in user plane packet processing matters the most.

Ubuntu Desktop firmly places security at the forefront, and adheres to the principles of security by default. This approach caters to both everyday users and organisations with specific compliance requirements. As such, Ubuntu ensures that its recommended security configurations are equally robust, easy to understand and readily accessible as part of the default user experience.

Data centres are going through a transformation. Gradually, we will see a new type of equipment attached to servers in almost every data centre: smartNICs are here. They will be the enablers of converged data centres where common infrastructure tasks are offloaded from a host server to attached network interface cards (NIC).

I recently recorded a Lightboard presentation on securing open source software dependencies in the public cloud. This blog summarises, and expands upon, some of the key elements from that presentation: I think about this topic through two lenses: software supply chains and updating software dependencies while maintaining stability.

Have you heard the news? Charmed Kubeflow 1.8 is available in Beta. Kubeflow is the foundation of Canonical MLOps. The latest release brings improved capabilities to personalise different components of the platform, including the images that can be used in Notebooks. We are looking for data scientists, machine learning engineers, creators and AI enthusiasts to take Charmed Kubeflow 1.8 Beta for a test drive and share their feedback with us.

On 24 July 2023, security researchers from Google’s Information Security Engineering team disclosed a hardware vulnerability affecting AMD’s Zen 2 family of microprocessors. They dubbed this vulnerability “Zenbleed” (CVE-2023-20593), evoking memories of previous vulnerabilities like HeartBleed and hinting at its possible impact.