Cloud computing is the future, but keep an eye on those monthly bills Watch Now

Mark Shuttleworth looked good at OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. Not only were his company Canonical and operating system Ubuntu Linux doing well, but thanks to his microfasting diet, he's lost 40 pounds. Energized and feeling good, he's looking forward to taking Canonical to its initial public offering (IPO) in 2019 and making the company more powerful than ever.

It's taken him longer than expected to IPO Canonical. Shuttleworth explained, "We will do the right thing at the right time. That's not this year, though. There's a process that you have to go through and that takes time. We know what we need to hit in terms of revenue and growth and we're on track."

In the meantime, besides his own wealth -- according to the BBC, his personal wealth jumped by £340 million last year -- he's turned to private equity to help fuel Canonical's growth.

And, where is that growth coming from? Well, it's not the desktop. Found as users -- and Shuttleworth himself -- of the Linux desktop, Canonical's real money comes in from the cloud.

Ubuntu remains the dominant cloud operating system. According to the May 8, 2018 Cloud Market statistics, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, Ubuntu dominates the cloud with 209,000 instances, well ahead of its competitors Amazon Linux AMI, 88,500; Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS's 31,400, and Windows Server's 29,200. As another data point, the executives at the OpenStack cloud company Rackspace told me that although their company had started with RHEL, today it's 60/40 Ubuntu.

OpenStack has been very, very good for Canonical, which is more than you can say for many companies that tried to make it as OpenStack providers or distributors. "With OpenStack it's important to deliver on the underlying promise of more cost-effective infrastructure," Shuttleworth said. Sure, "You can love technology and you can have new projects and it can all be kumbaya and open source, but what really matters is computers, virtual machines, virtual disks, virtual networks. So we ruthlessly focus on delivering that and then also solving all the problems around that."

So it is, Shuttleworth claims, that "Canonical can deliver an OpenStack platform to an enterprise in two weeks with everything in place."

What's driving Canonical growth on both the public and OpenStack-based cloud is "machine learning and container operations. The economics of automating the data center brings people to Ubuntu."

That said, "The Internet of Things (IoT) is still an area of investment for us. We have the right set of primitives [Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu for IoT and Snap contanizeried applications] to bring IoT all over the planet." But, it's "not profitable yet".

Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu will end up leading IoT, as it has the cloud, "because a developer can transfer their programs from a workstation to the cloud to a gateway to the IoT. I want to make sure we build the right set of technologies so you can operate a billion things with Ubuntu on it." To make this happen, Shuttleworth said Canonical currently has just short of 600 full-time developers.

As for the desktop, Shuttleworth finds it a "fascinating study of human nature that Unity [Ubuntu's former desktop] became a complete exercise in torches and pitchforks. I'm now convinced a lot of the people who demanded its demise never used it." That's because, while "I think GNOME is a nicely done desktop," many Ubuntu users are now objecting to GNOME. Shuttleworth also had kind words about the KDE Neon, MATE, and LXDE desktops. Still, "I do miss Unity, but I use GNOME."

Shuttleworth would like to see the open-source community become "safer to put new ideas out into it." Too often, "it's obnoxious to someone else's labor of love."

That said, in business competition, Shuttleworth said, after people criticized him for calling out Red Hat and VMware by name in his OpenStack keynote speech, "I don't think it was offsides to talk about money and competition. OpenStack has to be in the room where public clouds are discussed and Ubuntu has to be in the conversation when it comes to cloud operating systems. No one has questioned the facts."

In a way, though, having given up on innovating on the desktop and on the smartphone market has been a blessing. "I can work with more focus on cloud and the edge and IoT. We're moving faster. Our security and performance story can be tighter because we can put more time on both them."

One thing that Shuttleworth believes Canonical does better than his competition is delivering the best from upstream to its customers. "Take OpenStack, we didn't invent a bunch of pieces. We take care of stuff people need by trusting the upstream community. People find this refreshing."

Canonical also succeeds, he thinks, because they eat their own dog food. "We learn stuff by operating it ourselves and not just developing it. We experience what it's like to operate many OpenStack and Kubernetes stacks. We then offer these complex solutions as a managed service, and that reduces the cost for users."

The result is a company that Shuttleworth is sure will lead the way in the cloud and container-driven world of IT.

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