Canonical Releases OpenStack Autopilot Open Source Cloud Management

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This post originally appeared at The Var Guy

Bringing OpenStack private clouds to the masses is the pitch behind Canonical's latest move in the open source cloud computing market. Today, the company released OpenStack Autopilot, a cloud management tool for Ubuntu Linux.

Autopilot, which has been available in beta form since last year and now enters general availability, is a feature in Landscape, Canonical's platform for managing deployments of Ubuntu systems. It extends the product to include support for automated OpenStack deployment and administration using Ubuntu servers. It can set up clouds, add new hardware to existing clouds and assist with cloud management.

Autopilot also offers the ability to run OpenStack administrative services inside dedicated containers via LXD, Canonical's home-grown virtualization hypervisor.

In addition, it supports "a range of software-defined storage and networking options," according to Canonical. Those now include OpenDaylight, an open source SDN that has been added to Autopilot with the general-availability release.

The company is pitching Autopilot as a way for organizations to build private clouds using OpenStack without having to break the budget by hiring OpenStack expertise.

"Economics are the prime driver of cloud adoption; for public and also for private cloud," said Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. "The OpenStack Autopilot transforms the economics of private cloud, enabling every institution to create its own private cloud without hiring specialist OpenStack skills and without any third-party consulting."

This first ran at http://thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/canonical-releases-openstack-autopilot-open-source-cloud-