Containers remain one of the hottest trends in technology thanks to the new ways they’re allowing developers to write new applications.

Canonical – the developer of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system – today is hopping on the container management bandwagon by integrating its popular OS with Kubernetes, an open source project for managing containers at scale.

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Canonical has been on the leading edge of developing container technology thanks to its heavy focus on Linux. Canonical has developed LXC and LXD, both of which are container platforms. In addition to supporting those open source tools, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth says his goal is to make Ubuntu a platform for using many different higher-level container management tools too, including Kubernetes. To that end, the company has plans to integrate Ubuntu with Docker Swarm and Mesos’s Mesosphere too.

Canonical’s distribution of Kubernetes is a pure, vanilla version of the open source container management platform, Shuttleworth says. The key is that it integrates with Ubuntu, so users can run Kubernetes anywhere they run Ubuntu. That means Canonical’s Kubernetes can run in a customer’s on-premises infrastructure running Ubuntu or any of the major public IaaS cloud vendors who offer the Ubuntu OS.

Canonical becomes just the latest vendors to offer a distribution or integration of Kubernetes. Red Hat has integrated Kubernetes into its OpenShift platform as a service; PaaS vendor Apprenda bought Kubernetes integrator Kismatic earlier this year and container startup CoreOS has its own distribution of Kubernetes too.

“It’s direct access to Kubernetes without what some would describe as a PaaS layer,” Shuttleworth says. By using Kubernetes with other platforms like Red Hat or Apprenda, there’s an additional PaaS layer atop it. “These are unobfuscated Kubernetes APIs.”

Read a blog post from Canonical about the news here.