Everything you need for your mission–critical workloads.
For organisations of any type looking for a high performance private cloud at a low cost.
For telecommunications service providers looking for a network function virtualisation infrastructure.
For institutions that value stability and security above all else.
For businesses and research institutions who are running compute–intensive workloads.
Need an architecture tailored to your needs?
No two private cloud platforms are the same. Have a look on the table below to see how Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack differs from other private cloud platforms.
| Charmed OpenStack | VMware | AWS Outposts | Azure Stack | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No mandatory subscription |
|
– | – | – |
| Full automation |
|
– |
|
– |
| Region freedom |
|
|
– | – |
| Technology freedom |
|
|
– |
|
| Professional services |
|
|
|
|
| Enterprise support |
|
|
|
|
| Self–managed option |
|
|
– |
|
| Fully–managed option |
|
– |
|
– |
| Stable release cadence |
|
– | – | – |
| Open source |
|
– | – | – |
The main driver for most OpenStack deployments is the cost benefit of using a leaner and more open IaaS. Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack also offers a range of cloud services, and compatibility with hybrid cloud and multi-cloud operations tools. While legacy virtualisation continues to be important, the future is cloud APIs and container-based operations, which Charmed OpenStack delivers.
Canonical provides workload analysis and migration services from VMware and other cloud types. Not every workload is best run on a cloud, but 80-90% of enterprise workloads can move to OpenStack easily, and are much more cost-efficient to run there.
The biggest challenge of OpenStack is everyday operations automation, year after year, while OpenStack continues to evolve rapidly. Canonical solves this problem with total automation that decouples architectural choices from the operations codebase that supports upgrades, scaling, integration and bare metal provisioning.
In traditional automation environments based on Ansible, Chef or Puppet, architectural choices are hard-coded in the configuration management system. That means the operations code cannot be shared across various architectures, organisations and market sectors. Every cloud becomes its own unique snowflake. This approach does not scale and results in significant costs.
You don’t need to hire a large operations team that follows every aspect of OpenStack development. Just focus on high-level operations and your business workloads.
Running private clouds requires setting up and maintaining the underlying physical infrastructure. Before organisations can even start deploying the cloud, all machines have to be racked, powered, cabled and the base OS has to be installed on them. Performing all of these tasks manually becomes expensive as the number of machines grows.
You no longer need to focus on physical infrastructure operations. Just set up your data centre and let MAAS discover your machines and provision them for you on-demand.
OpenStack is a complex system consisting of various interconnected components. Therefore, its operations are challenging even in a fully automated environment. We recognise that and offer fully managed services for organisations who do not have sufficient OpenStack knowledge, but want to go to market fast. With Canonical’s Managed OpenStack our customers get 24x7 cloud monitoring, daily maintenance, regular software updates, OpenStack upgrades and more. Managed OpenStack is also a more economical option up to 300 nodes.
Learn more about Managed OpenStack ›Designing the cloud for the best price-performance starts with making an architecture choice. Although the Hyper-Converged architecture is the most often chosen by organisations, Canonical supports other architectures as well to meet customers’ needs.
The biggest challenge when building a private cloud is to maximise performance of workloads, utilisation of data centre resources and cost efficiency at the same time. This is challenging as multiple factors shape this multidimensional curve, from cloud architecture to hardware choices.
Canonical partners with leading silicon and hardware vendors to ensure the latest improvements in the compute space are tested and validated on Ubuntu. This enables us to design a cloud architecture that answers the performance needs. We also assist with workload analysis to make sure that the cloud we build has an optimal capacity. In order to guarantee the maximum cost efficiency, we run a bidding process with leading hardware vendors on behalf of our customers.
With Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack you get:
OpenStack leverages the leading virtualisation stack based on QEMU/KVM/libvirt to provide the best user experience for virtual machines management.
Kubernetes provides a cloud-native containers layer on top of OpenStack with automated scheduling, rolling updates and autoscaling support.
Enterprise multi-cloud Kubernetes ›
Network is an essential component in every data centre. A poorly designed network can significantly affect the overall performance of the cloud and become a bottleneck in the traffic flow. On the other hand, network improvements should always be driven by economics so as not to affect the overall budget.
Canonical’s partnership with hyperscale public clouds ensures that we have deep insight into the dynamics of cloud network performance and security best practices for large-scale multi-tenanted operations. Moreover, our experience with telcos for NFV and edge clouds ensures that our solution works well in complex environments where latency and security are critical.
With Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack you get:
Open Virtual Network (OVN) and Open vSwitch (OVS) are a foundation of an open source SDN which is gaining popularity, especially in general-purpose OpenStack deployments.
Many organisations are still tied to their existing vendors. We recognise that and partner with leading network equipment providers (NEPs) to ensure their SDN platforms are tested and validated with Charmed OpenStack.
Storage is one of the most tricky components when architecting a cloud. Storage costs per TB vary by several orders of magnitude depending on the storage types and technologies used. Thus, making careful selections when designing storage architecture is essential from a price-performance point of view.
Canonical’s approach towards storage architecture optimisation leverages multiple storage tiers. While big, cheap, low performance disks are used as ultimate storage devices, several smaller, more expensive, high performance devices serve as a cache in front. This approach ensures the required performance of the entire cloud, while not affecting hardware costs significantly.
With Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack you get:
Ceph is an open source distributed software-defined storage platform, providing a flexible storage option for OpenStack, Kubernetes and standalone storage clusters.
While Ceph provides the best price-performance rate, it is not always an option. Therefore, Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack provides support for various other storage platforms including Swift, iSCSI and more.
Designing a private cloud is a non-trivial task. Making wrong architectural choices results in an increased TCO and a lot of rework on the next states of the cloud journey. We understand that and offer consulting services to help our customers choose the right mix of features to find the best cloud architecture for their needs. Moreover, our experienced team of cloud experts also deploys the cloud according to the requirements. All of that at a fixed price.
Learn more about our OpenStack consulting ›Building a private cloud entails additional security and compliance challenges. While in the public cloud, these activities are handled by the cloud service provider out of the box, when deploying an on-premises infrastructure, all must be undertaken by internal teams.
Canonical's Charmed OpenStack includes up to ten years of security updates, cloud hardening options according to common security benchmarks and compliance programmes to meet local US and EU regulations for enterprise customers.
What’s included:
Operations in highly coherent large-scale distributed clusters require a new level of observability. Cloud operations teams have to be able to check cluster health, monitor cloud capacity and investigate individual server logs from a centralised operations dashboard.
Canonical delivers an integrated observability stack for logging, monitoring and alerting based on established open source technologies with every deployed infrastructure component, including Charmed OpenStack.
What’s included:
With increasingly complex and critical OpenStack environments, companies and service providers need to look for the best ways to fully protect their business, while at the same time providing easier, faster and more reliable recovery.
TrilioVault’s cloud-native design can dramatically reduce the amount of time organisations spend on restoration activities. It integrates with the OpenStack dashboard out-of-the-box to provide sysadmins with complete visibility into their private cloud operations in a single view.
What’s included:
Since OpenStack is open source, enterprise customers rely on the vendor to provide ongoing support for their infrastructure. Canonical provides full-stack commercial support under the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure (UA-I) subscription which includes phone and ticket support, production-grade SLAs, ten years of security updates and security and compliance programmes. The subscription is charged per node and covers all layers of the open infrastructure stack: from bare metal to microservices.
