PARIS -- Any doubts you might have had about Canonical, best known for its Ubuntu Linux distribution, refocusing it energy on cloud-based Linux rather than desktop or mobile Linux were put to rest at the OpenStack Summit.

Sure, Canonical just released a new version of Ubuntu, 14.10 , but the real changes in this release were for OpenStack cloud administrators, not desktop users. With Canonical Distribution for Ubuntu OpenStack, which is now in public beta, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said: "This is a complete autopilot for your private cloud."

Shuttleworth continued:

"Point it at a rack or 10 with Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) and tell it your storage, software-defined network (SDN), and hypervisor preferences. It will then automatically create your cloud, manage and monitor it for you, keep it fully secure, and update it to the next version of OpenStack in due course. This is for people who want a high-performance reference cloud and want to focus on their own applications and workloads rather than the underlying infrastructure."

To make this happen, the Canonical Distribution uses Canonical Landscape for systems management and Juju for DevOps. The release also supports multiple vendor components for network, storage and compute.

First impressions: Canonical Orange Box and Juju (Gallery)

Is it worth checking out? Ubuntu is already the most popular OpenStack operating system . At Paris OpenStack Summit, the BMW and Time Warner keynote presenters both made a particular point of saying that Ubuntu is their OpenStack operating system of choice.

Ubuntu is not just for Linux OpenStack users. Microsoft, for example, is working with Canonical to get Windows Server running on OpenStack and Ubuntu. Ubuntu is indeed well on its way from being "just" a popular Linux company to being an enterprise cloud company.

To try it for yourself, set up a server rack and follow the instructions on Installing Ubuntu OpenStack: The Canonical Distribution. If you are at OpenStack Summit Paris, Canonical is demoing the distro at its booth.

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