Ubuntu 19.10 offers ‘integrated’ AI/ML developer experience

Autumn (or Fall, depending on your level of Americanization) was a busy period… so busy in fact that the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog saw a number of milestone advancements go whizzing past.

Among those news items we’re catching up on as we approach the Christmas silly season is the latest update from Canonical on Ubuntu.

Canonical is positioning Ubuntu as (in its view) an operating system (OS) of choice for ‘most’ (it was clear not to say all) public cloud workloads, as well as the emerging categories of ‘smart gateways’, self-driving cars and advanced robots. 

NOTE: NXP defines smart gateways as an appliance that bridges a Wide Area Network (WAN/cloud) connection to a Local Area Network (LAN), usually via Wi-Fi and/or Ethernet in a user’s home or a company premises. 

Now that we reach the Ubuntu 19.10 version release, Canonical says that it has increased its focus on accelerating developer productivity in AI/ML and brought forward new edge capabilities for MicroK8s and delivering the fastest GNOME desktop performance.

NOTE: MicroK8s is a CNCF certified upstream Kubernetes deployment that runs entirely on a workstation or edge device — being a ‘snap’ (a Canonical application packaging & delivery mechanism) it runs all Kubernetes services natively (i.e. no virtual machines) while packing the entire set of libraries and binaries needed.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth says that Ubuntu 19.10 brings enhanced edge computing capabilities with the addition of strict confinement to MicroK8s. 

Strict confinement ensures complete isolation and a tightly secured production-grade Kubernetes environment, all in a small footprint ideal for edge gateways. MicroK8s add-ons – including Istio, Knative, CoreDNS, Prometheus, and Jaeger – can now be deployed securely at the edge with a single command. 

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is supported by Ubuntu 19.10. The latest board from the Raspberry Pi Foundation offers a faster system-on-a-chip with a processor that uses the Cortex-A72 architecture (quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 at 1.5GHz) and offers up to 4GB of RAM. 

Additionally here, Ubuntu 19.10 ships with the Train release of Charmed OpenStack – the 20th OpenStack release, backed by the Nautilus release of Ceph. 

Shuttleworth and team insist that this marks Canonical’s long-term commitment to open infrastructure and improving the cost of cloud operations. Train provides live migration extensions to aid telcos in their infrastructure operations. Live migration allows users to move their machines from one hypervisor to another without shutting down the operating system of the machine. 

Finally here, Canonical says it has thought about users running Ubuntu on older hardware — which, arguably, is contentious ground for some as open source purists will want to position an open OS as ‘more than just something you stick on an old Windows machine to bring it to life’ — and so with GNOME 3.34, Ubuntu 19.10 is the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering what the company has called a more responsive and smooth experience, even on older hardware.