Canonical yesterday unveiled a new version of Ubuntu that's designed for the cloud, saying it ditches the traditional apt-get system in favor of "transactional updates" that mimic the simplicity of phone updates.

Ubuntu Core, the new version, "is a minimal server image with the same libraries as today’s Ubuntu, but applications are provided through a simpler mechanism," Canonical said. Applications are more secure because they're isolated from each other within containers, the company explained. Ubuntu Core is in beta on Microsoft Azure and can be run locally on the KVM hypervisor. It's optimized to run in conjunction with Docker, software that automates the deployment of applications within containers.

"This is in a sense the biggest break with tradition in 10 years of Ubuntu, because Ubuntu Core doesn’t use debs or apt-get," Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth wrote. "We call it 'snappy' because that’s the new bullet-proof mechanism for app delivery and system updates; it’s completely different to the traditional package-based Ubuntu server and desktop. The snappy system keeps each part of Ubuntu in a separate, read-only file and does the same for each application. That way, developers can deliver everything they need to be confident their app will work exactly as they intend, and we can take steps to keep the various apps isolated from one another and ensure that updates are always perfect. Of course, that means that apt-get won’t work, but that’s OK since developers can reuse debs to make their snappy apps, and the core system is exactly the same as any other Ubuntu system—server or desktop."

Canonical's Cloud Community Liaison Jorge Castro explained to Ars that "the updates are image-based, so they update like your phone does, you reboot it and it either works or it doesn't apply. The updates are also much faster because you're just writing in a stream to the disk instead of downloading packages, unpacking each individual one, then waiting for each one to upgrade... and since it's an image base we can push deltas of changes, which is nice."

Shuttleworth said in an accompanying video that Canonical had to develop new methods of updating for Ubuntu phones and that it's applying those methods to Ubuntu Core. While only available on Azure today, "in the next couple of weeks it will show up on all of our certified clouds," he said. As for Ubuntu phones, Shuttleworth said, "we're about to ship the first consumer-grade, carrier-grade Ubuntu phones in Europe, and then in China."

Shuttleworth also predicted that Ubuntu Core will simplify systems management. "Instead of having literally thousands of packages on your Ubuntu server with tons of dependencies, a snappy system just has a single package for each actual app or framework that’s installed," he wrote.