Papers by “Canonical”

How to integrate Ubuntu Desktop with Active Directory

– whitepaper

Microsoft Active Directory is a widely deployed directory service that is commonly used for identity management and authentication across the enterprise. Its ubiquity makes it a fixture of the IT landscape. As a result, interoperability with Active Directory is often a necessity when deploying services based on non-Microsoft operating systems. We have worked to make Ubuntu as integrated as possible with Active Directory to streamline the experience of IT administrators and security teams alike. Ubuntu has been engineered to support standard operations like login/logout through SSSD, as well as more advanced flows like Group Policy Objects (GPOs), script execution, network shares, certificate enrollment, AppArmor profiles, and proxy settings through ADsys.

October 2024

From VMware to OpenStack

– Lower TCO by 40% with your own open source cloud

Cloud computing is now a central piece of enterprise IT estates. According to Gartner, overall spending on cloud infrastructure will approach the 50% mark by 2025. As IT estates grow and become more complex, the total cost of ownership (TCO) can increase substantially, serving as a catalyst for an ongoing challenge businesses face—optimizing infrastructure expenditure. This is especially relevant for organizations that have been historically using traditional proprietary solutions. Those solutions not only tend to be overly expensive due to license costs but often also lead to lock-in through layers of interdependent services and lengthy contractual obligations. In light of these shortcomings, it is no surprise that following the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, companies are now re-evaluating their IT strategies.

October 2024

A guide to infrastructure hardening

– Best practices to improve the security posture of your Linux-based infrastructure deployments.

Cloud technology and virtualisation enable developers and administrators to deploy infrastructure at a pace previously unheard of, which has brought them huge gains and enabled almost anyone to create internet services. However, this facility and flexibility does not mask the underlying need for deployments to be secure. The ever-present threats of ransomware attacks and data breaches make it imperative to lock down systems and prevent attackers from gaining an easy foothold. A fully secure system is made up of many layers, from the hardware to the operating system and the application servers running your mission-critical code. Each deployment will be different but there are a number of universal themes to securing a system and hardening the infrastructure that your application is running on.

October 2024

MLOps explained: choose the right stack to build your end-to-end solutions

– whitepaper

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are not just a hot topic but a great opportunity for enterprises to tackle some of the most challenging problems they have. Generative AI offers organizations a chance to automate repetitive tasks, improve processes, and move away from traditional approaches to performing different activities. This is all exciting, but the tooling selection is not that easy to navigate. Having the right machine learning tools unblocks teams that are starting their journey. Once you identify use cases and have the data at hand, building an environment where professionals can initially experiment and then scale is crucial. Among the key factors, they need to consider the underlying hardware, the chosen cloud environment, and the machine learning tools available. Open source is widely adopted in the AI ecosystem. However, challenges such as security, user management, or tool integration are still barriers to adoption.

October 2024

MLOps explained: choose the right stack to build your end-to-end solutions

– whitepaper

Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are not just a hot topic but a great opportunity for enterprises to tackle some of the most challenging problems they have. Generative AI offers organizations a chance to automate repetitive tasks, improve processes, and move away from traditional approaches to performing different activities. This is all exciting, but the tooling selection is not that easy to navigate. Having the right machine learning tools unblocks teams that are starting their journey. Once you identify use cases and have the data at hand, building an environment where professionals can initially experiment and then scale is crucial. Among the key factors, they need to consider the underlying hardware, the chosen cloud environment, and the machine learning tools available. Open source is widely adopted in the AI ecosystem. However, challenges such as security, user management, or tool integration are still barriers to adoption.

August 2024

From VMware to OpenStack

– Lower TCO by 40% with your own open source cloud

Cloud computing is now a central piece of enterprise IT estates. According to Gartner, overall spending on cloud infrastructure will approach the 50% mark by 2025. As IT estates grow and become more complex, the total cost of ownership (TCO) can increase substantially, serving as a catalyst for an ongoing challenge businesses face—optimizing infrastructure expenditure. This is especially relevant for organizations that have been historically using traditional proprietary solutions. Those solutions not only tend to be overly expensive due to license costs but often also lead to lock-in through layers of interdependent services and lengthy contractual obligations. In light of these shortcomings, it is no surprise that following the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, companies are now re-evaluating their IT strategies.

August 2024

How to integrate Ubuntu Desktop with Active Directory

– whitepaper

Microsoft Active Directory is a widely deployed directory service that is commonly used for identity management and authentication across the enterprise. Its ubiquity makes it a fixture of the IT landscape. As a result, interoperability with Active Directory is often a necessity when deploying services based on non-Microsoft operating systems. We have worked to make Ubuntu as integrated as possible with Active Directory to streamline the experience of IT administrators and security teams alike. Ubuntu has been engineered to support standard operations like login/logout through SSSD, as well as more advanced flows like Group Policy Objects (GPOs), script execution, network shares, certificate enrollment, AppArmor profiles, and proxy settings through ADsys.

August 2024

A guide to infrastructure hardening

– Best practices to improve the security posture of your Linux-based infrastructure deployments.

Cloud technology and virtualisation enable developers and administrators to deploy infrastructure at a pace previously unheard of, which has brought them huge gains and enabled almost anyone to create internet services. However, this facility and flexibility does not mask the underlying need for deployments to be secure. The ever-present threats of ransomware attacks and data breaches make it imperative to lock down systems and prevent attackers from gaining an easy foothold. A fully secure system is made up of many layers, from the hardware to the operating system and the application servers running your mission-critical code. Each deployment will be different but there are a number of universal themes to securing a system and hardening the infrastructure that your application is running on.

August 2024

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