Broadcom and Canonical have expanded their collaboration to accelerate modern container and AI workloads. By integrating Ubuntu Pro and chiseled containers into VMware Cloud Foundation, both parties aim to help organizations deploy Kubernetes applications faster and more securely.
This collaboration comes at just the right time for AI workloads. Broadcom can now offer Ubuntu images with pre-compiled virtualized GPU drivers. This solution is particularly valuable for air-gapped environments that struggle with external GPU drivers. More important, however, is the efficiency and security that Ubuntu can offer with its containers.
Focus on security and efficiency
The collaboration between Broadcom and Canonical focuses on solving common challenges in modern application development. Paul Turner of Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation Division says that organizations often struggle with improving the development process, but also with managing security risks and simplifying AI workload implementations.
According to Regis Paquette of Canonical, it’s all about a long-standing dilemma: “innovate or stay safe?” By integrating enterprise-grade Ubuntu and chiseled containers into VMware Cloud Foundation, organizations can achieve both goals a lot faster.
Chiseled containers for better performance
A notable element of the collaboration is the use of chiseled Ubuntu containers. These lighter container images for popular programming languages such as Python, .NET, and Go consume significantly less storage space and speed up network transfers.
By removing unnecessary content from containers, chiseled containers significantly reduce the attack surface and require less computing power and storage capacity.
Ubuntu Pro with enterprise support
The expanded collaboration offers customers enterprise-grade support for the entire stack, including Ubuntu OS and Kubernetes containers. An important part of this is accelerated deployment of security patches. Ubuntu has robust processes for assessing, prioritizing, and resolving critical vulnerabilities that Broadcom customers can now leverage.
This approach is in line with previous research in which 58 percent of companies plan to migrate VM workloads to Kubernetes. The integration should simplify this process by providing a stable foundation.