Today Ubuntu 14.04 LTS was released. Ubuntu is an extremely popular Linux distribution. LTS is the long term support tag given to releases every two years that will have regular updates made. These LTS versions tend to become favorites for enterprise deployments. Ubuntu is being positioned as a key piece of OpenStack deployments. With 14.04 LTS the project has moved ahead with incorporating newer components but also new features with MAAS and Juju to ease deployments.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS also makes technology such as Docker available via apt-get making installation very easy. From the release:
14.04 is more than Ubuntu OpenStack. Docker, arguably the hottest cloud infrastructure technology around today, is included in this release. Ubuntu has always been the preferred platform for Docker users, and now support for Docker is included in the Ubuntu Advantage support packages offered by Canonical. Docker’s image repository includes official Ubuntu images, including 14.04, and Docker is available to Ubuntu users via apt-get. This release also includes quite a few package updates, including Tomcat 7, Postgresql 9.3, Libvirt 1.2, Puppet 3.0 and others.
Since we started STHbench in 2013 we have used the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS version as our standard. This provided a fairly stable platform for benchmarking. Towards the end of 2013 we were feeling pressure as drivers were not available for newer hardware in time.
Recently major work has been done on the new STH Linux Benchmark script for CPUs. We have even started a small mini-site and started work on a results viewer. Moving to the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS gives a more modern underpinning to the script. One of the big changes is that the script now works with CentOS, Mint and several other popular distributions. The current plan is to use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as the standard for STH testing both in benchmarks but also for compatibility testing with hardware. We have a few platforms that will be tested soon and those will utilize Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS for compatibility testing.
Overall this is certainly exciting news that will have an impact on the site.
