Canonical's Multipass 0.9 Released For Easily Spinning Up Ubuntu VMs

Multipass, the Canonical-led open-source project that aims to make it easy to spin up Ubuntu VM instances on Linux and Windows and macOS, is up to version 0.9 ahead of a possible 1.0 release for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Multipass is the Canonical-led lightweight VM manager focused on quickly and easily creating new Ubuntu instances. Multipass builds atop KVM on Linux while on Windows has Hyper-V or VirtualBox and macOS has HyperKit and VirtualBox at its disposal. Multipass is a lot like Vagrant and makes it easy to fetch the latest distribution images, quickly and easily launching new instances with a single command, and other features. In catering to Ubuntu, it's also friendly with Snaps for deployment.

The Multipass 0.9 release out today enables image compaction / garbage collection for recovering disk space, mounts are more resilient, AppArmor confinement around QEMU, Snap integration improvements, the daemon should be more responsive, and a wide variety of other fixes and improvements.

More details on Multipass 0.9 and the open-source VM manager project in general can be found via GitHub and the official project site at multipass.run. Being early in the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle, it will be interesting to see what else Canonical does for Multipass ahead of the April long-term support release.