Canonical is tightening its focus on cloud and enterprise markets. The company has released a new version of Ubuntu, dubbed Minimal Ubuntu, which it claims is optimized for automated use at scale, with a tiny package set and minimal security cross-section.

Canonical claims that Minimal Ubuntu is the smallest Ubuntu base image for cloud operations. These images are less than 50% the size of the standard Ubuntu server image, and boot up to 40% faster.

Small doesn’t mean less. Despite its reduced size, Minimal Ubuntu retains full compatibility with standard Ubuntu. Any Ubuntu package can be installed on Minimal Ubuntu.

“The small footprint of Minimal Ubuntu, when deployed with fast VM provisioning from GCE, helps deliver drastically improved boot times, making them a great choice for developers looking to build their applications on Google Cloud Platform,” said Paul Nash, Group Product Manager, Google Cloud.”

Images of Minimal Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS are available for use now in Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine (GCE), LXD and KVM/OpenStack.

Source: https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/07/09/minimal-ubuntu-released[1]

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