Canonical hosted an amusingly failure-filled demo of its new easy-to-install, Ubuntu-powered software for constructing small-to-medium scale, on-premises high-availability clusters, Microcloud, at an occasion in London yesterday. From a report: The intro to the discuss leaned closely on Canonical’s looming twentieth anniversary, and with good purpose. Ubuntu has carved out a considerable slice of the Linux marketplace for itself on the idea of being simpler to make use of than most of its rivals, for free of charge — one thing that many Linux gamers nonetheless appear to not absolutely comprehend. The presentation was as buzzword-heavy as one would possibly count on, and it is also extensively based mostly on Canonical’s in-house tech, such because the LXD containervisor, Snap packaging, and, optionally, the Ubuntu Core snap-based immutable distro. (The one lacking buzzword did not crop up till the Q&A session, and we had been happy by its absence: it isn’t constructed on and does not use Kubernetes, however you possibly can run Kubernetes on it if you want.)
We’re sure that is going to show off or alienate lots of the extra fundamentalist Penguinistas, however we’re equally certain that Canonical will not care. Within the immortal phrases of Kevin Smith, it isn’t for critics. Microcloud combines a number of present bits of off-the-shelf FOSS tech as a way to make it straightforward to hyperlink from three to 50 Ubuntu machines into an in-house, personal high-availability cluster, with reside migration and computerized failover. It makes use of its personal LXD containervisor to handle nodes and workloads, Ceph for distributed storage, OpenZFS for native storage, and OVN to virtualize the cluster interconnect. All of the instruments are packaged as snaps. It helps each x86-64 and Arm64 nodes, together with Raspberry Pi equipment, and clusters can combine each architectures. The occasion included a number of demonstrations utilizing an on-stage cluster of three ODROID machines with “Intel N6005” processors, so we reckon they had been ODROID H3+ models — which we suspect the corporate selected due to their twin Ethernet connections.