Pivotal, developers of the Cloud Foundry open source cloud development platform and Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced a partnership today where Ubuntu becomes the preferred operating system for Cloud Foundry.
In fact, the two companies have been BFFs since the earliest days of Cloud Foundry when it was an open source project developed at VMware. When VMware, EMC and GE spun out Pivotal as a separate company in 2013, Cloud Foundry was a big part of that and the relationship continued through today. Dustin Kirkland, head of Ubuntu product and strategy at Canonical, said he was surprised it took so long to formalize it, but today’s announcement marks a more official partnership.
It should help make life easier for Cloud Foundry customers running Ubuntu Linux in a number of important ways. First of all, it enables easy Ubuntu Linux upgrades and automated security patch management to give Cloud Foundry users quick access to any critical updates.
It also gives them access to Level 3 Ubuntu support. That means when there’s a problem that Cloud Foundry support personnel identify as an Ubuntu issue, the ticket gets transferred to Ubuntu where they handle it. In grey areas, which happen occasionally, Kirkland said they will work together to sort it out, but both companies have extensive experience performing support triage.
What’s more, the two companies have agreed to work together on a security certification framework, so that Ubuntu and Pivotal will be involved with the organizations writing the security standards manuals, which Ubuntu uses as a guide to build the most secure operating system possible. This is particularly important because the two companies can now help define and write these standards in a way that makes sense to them.
“We’ve signed up and are contributing to next iteration of these benchmarks, and we’re taking a more active role in developing these guides going forward.” Kirkland explained.
Since its inception, Pivotal has raised an astonishing $1.7 billion, according to Crunchbase. In its most recent round in May, Pivotal scored a $650 million Series C round led by Ford Motor Company on a valuation of $2.8 billion.
