Is Ubuntu becoming a big name in enterprise Linux servers?

He may be on to something. In my own technology, I found that Cloud Market, a group that scans the Amazon EC2 cloud use shows Ubuntu is the top operating system with nearly 12-thousand instances. Generic Linux comes in second trailing by thousands, and Windows is far behind in third with 3,58-thousand instances. Combining RHEL with its clone CentOS, the Red Hat family came in with about 2.3-thousand.

Now Cloud Market is measuring Amazon Machine Image, a pre-configured operating system and virtual application software which is used to create a virtual machine, not the number of running systems. As Shuttleworth told me while our e-mail discussion of Cloud Market’s data "I would characterize it as an easily gamed measure of research or rather than a measure of adoption. It’s a measure of how many people have taken the OS and done their own snapshot with their own customizations, not a measure of how many of each of those images is running." Since, nevertheless, no one to my knowledge has been looking at Cloud Market’s data along these lines it strikes me as however showing serious business server interest in Ubuntu.

So why are people looking at Ubuntu for servers? In his blog posting Shuttleworth wrote, "The key driver of this has been that we added quality as a top-level goal across the teams that build Ubuntu - both Canonical's and the community's. We as well have retained the focus on keeping the up-to-date tools available on Ubuntu for developers, and on delivering a great experience in the cloud, where computing is headed."

Sure, "The headlines for Ubuntu have all been about the desktop and consumer-focused design efforts, with the introduction of Unity and the expansion of our goals to span the phone, the tablet, the TV as then as the PC. Nevertheless underpinning those goals has been a raising of the quality game."

Looking ahead, Shuttleworth wrote, "12.04 LTS [Long Term Support] is a coming of age release for Ubuntu in the data centre as much as its the first LTS to sport the interface which was designed to span the full range of personal computing needs. Together he notes that "OpenStack's [the popular open-source cloud platform) Essex release is lined up to be a perfect fit for 12.04 LTS. In other words not a coincidence, it's a value to which both projects are committed. Upstream projects that care about their user's and care about being adopted quickly, want an effective conduit of their goodness straight to users. By adopting the 6-month / 2-year cadence of step and LTS releases, and aligning those with Ubuntu's release cycle, OpenStack ensures that a very large audience of system administrators, developers and enterprise decision makers can plan for their OpenStack deployment, and know they will have a robust and very widely deployed LTS platform at the same time with a very widely supported release of OpenStack."

So is Ubuntu ready to take on RHEL? I think Ubuntu’s getting to be a significant server player, nevertheless it’s not at Red Hat’s level but. Red Hat is closing in on being the first pure-play Linux and open-source company with a billion in annual revenue. Canonical, during privately held, isn’t in that ballpark but. Just in case, Web servers, which Shuttleworth uses as the foundation for his claim, are edge servers and not as a matter of fact enterprise servers as such.

Still, Canonical’s flagship Linux is obviously adopted by more and more businesses. I can then believe that the race for being the number one Linux server in the 2010s might have Canonical and Ubuntu nipping at Red Hat’s heels or rather than SUSE or Oracle.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, aka sjvn, has been writing about innovation and the business of innovation since CP/M-80 was the cutting edge, PC operating system