Snappy Ubuntu Core Announced

Canonical just announced Ubuntu Core with snappy transactional updates.

Ubuntu Core has been re-introduced as Snappy Ubuntu Core with the best from Ubuntu Touch and the base Ubuntu Server operating system while adding in transactional updates and atomic, image-based workflows. Snappy Ubuntu Core thus allows for complete isolation between applications and with today's release runs on the Azure cloud and in KVM image form.

Mark Shuttleworth wrote the announcement. Here's his explanation of the snappy Ubuntu:

This is in a sense the biggest break with tradition in 10 years of Ubuntu, because Ubuntu Core doesn’t use debs or apt-get. We call it “snappy” because that’s the new bullet-proof mechanism for app delivery and system updates; it’s completely different to the traditional package-based Ubuntu server and desktop. The snappy system keeps each part of Ubuntu in a separate, read-only file, and does the same for each application. That way, developers can deliver everything they need to be confident their app will work exactly as they intend, and we can take steps to keep the various apps isolated from one another, and ensure that updates are always perfect. Of course, that means that apt-get won’t work, but that’s OK since developers can reuse debs to make their snappy apps, and the core system is exactly the same as any other Ubuntu system – server or desktop.

Whenever we make a fix to packages in Ubuntu, we’ll publish the same fix to Ubuntu Core, and systems can get that fix transactionally. In fact, updates to Ubuntu Core are even smaller than package updates because we only need to send the precise difference between the old and new versions, not the whole package. Of course, Ubuntu Core is in addition to all the current members of the Ubuntu family – desktop, server, and cloud images that use apt-get and debs, and all the many *buntu remixes which bring their particular shine to our community. You still get all the Ubuntu you like, and there’s a new snappy Core image on all the clouds for the sort of deployment where precision, specialism and security are the top priority.

This is the biggest new thing in Ubuntu since we committed to deliver a mobile phone platform, and it’s very delicious that it’s borne of exactly the same amazing technology that we’ve been perfecting for these last three years. I love it when two completely different efforts find underlying commonalities, and it’s wonderful to me that the work we’ve done for the phone, where carriers and consumers are the audience, might turn out to be so useful in the cloud, which is all about back-end infrastructure.

This snappy version of Ubuntu Core is coming to all major cloud providers soon. More details on Snappy Ubuntu Core can be found at Ubuntu.com.