Canonical at AWS Summit Washington, DC 2023

Canonical will participate in AWS Summit Washington, DC 2023 for the second time to discuss the most cutting-edge cloud solutions for the Public Sector, such as security and compliance, AI/ML solutions and improved functionality. 

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AWS Summit 2022

Last year, we discussed security and compliance and how easy it is to achieve FIPS, DISA STIG and CIS compliance in the cloud with our out-of-the-box Ubuntu Pro FIPS solutions and automation tools.

With Ubuntu Pro we deliver seamless compliance and confidence in your cloud infrastructure’s stability and security. With availability on AWS Govcloud in all other AWS regions, Federal agencies and contractors can easily access the tools we provide. 

What’s new

Ubuntu Pro is now available on Amazon EC2 

This year, we will share all our successes in increasing our solutions’ availability and more seamless integration on AWS. We recently announced that users can launch Ubuntu Pro on-demand instances and purchase Ubuntu Pro Compute Savings Plans from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) console.  

Running Ubuntu machines with expanded security maintenance, kernel live patch, and hardening scripts out of the box are a few of the many benefits users can access when launching new Ubuntu Pro machines on Amazon EC2, as Ubuntu Pro enables all these features by default. 

Seamless transition to Pro for all Ubuntu users

Thanks to Canonical and AWS collaboration, all existing Ubuntu customers can now seamlessly transition to the Pro version. Through AWS Systems Manager (SSM) and AWS License Manager, the experience of upgrading to Ubuntu Pro is just a matter of a couple of clicks. 

Ubuntu Pro Desktop on AWS Workspaces

Ubuntu Desktop for Amazon WorkSpaces gives IT organizations more choice to run fully managed remote desktops where they run best! Ubuntu Desktop for Amazon WorkSpaces enables IT organizations to improve productivity of Developers, Data Scientists, and Engineers – while lowering expenses and improving security posture.

Developers now have access to a familiar Ubuntu desktop environment and tools required to rapidly build, test and deploy code – spinning up and tearing down instances easily while only paying for resources consumed. And when performance is of paramount importance, Ubuntu Desktop for Amazon WorkSpaces gives Data Scientists and Engineers a high-performance environment optimized for GPU-intensive workloads, collaboration, and analysis involving massive datasets.

Ubuntu Pro Desktop adds the security features the enterprise needs with security patching more than 23,000 third party open source packages alongside the OS updates. It includes Kernel Livepatch increasing coverage against CVEs affecting your kernel while reducing downtime. 

Ubuntu Desktop on Amazon Workspaces: A quick start guide

CIS Hardening automation is now available for Ubuntu 22.04

Continuing the topic of security, CIS Hardening automation has recently become available for Ubuntu 22.04 with Ubuntu Security Guide (USG)! USG provides automated auditing and remediation for the Ubuntu platform for server and workstation CIS profiles.

Each profile is published with two levels of security hardening: level 1, which aims to be a robust security profile whilst still allowing the system to function as expected, and level 2, which has some more stringent security settings to satisfy a high level of security but with some reduced functionality. The USG tool works with all the CIS profiles providing output in HTML format for easy readability and XML for machine interfaces.

Join our upcoming webinar to explore CIS Hardening automation for Ubuntu 22.04

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AI/ML solutions for Public Sector on AWS  

The public sector invests heavily in AI, aiming to impact real-time operational decisions and outcomes within the next 12 months. Organisations kickstarted initiatives with different use cases in mind such as smart cities or task automation, looking for tooling that enables them to run AI at scale. 

The obvious next step to achieve these goals would be finding and integrating the right machine learning operations (MLOps) solutions,  such as Charmed Kubeflow, which recently became available as a software appliance on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace.

With the appliance, users can now launch and manage their machine learning workloads hassle-free using Charmed Kubeflow on AWS. This reduces deployment time and eases operations, providing an easy-to-install MLOps toolkit on the public cloud. It’s ideal for users to get a grasp of the full capabilities of the platform and take machine learning models from experimentation to production in a secured and supported environment.

Kubeflow helps professionals focus on the development and deployment of machine learning models, offering security patching, user management and a wide range of integrations on top of any Kubernetes. Having open-source ML tooling run on EKS translates into support for hybrid cloud scenario support and flexibility for enterprises who have both AWS clouds and on-prem environments.

Read more about AI in public sector.

Speaking session

Securing open-source software with Platform One | IronBank

Iron Bank is Platform One’s hardened container image repository that supports the end-to-end lifecycle needed for modern software development.

The 2021 Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (EO 14028) establishes new requirements intended to secure the U.S. federal government’s software supply chain and provides critical guidance for improving cyber resiliency for government agencies.

Using and consuming open-source software from trusted ecosystems can help provide visibility into security threats and mitigate zero-day supply chain threats. In this lightning talk, Zac Burke, Chairman of Iron Bank at USAF Platform One, and Devin Breen, Director Federal at Canonical will engage in a compelling talk on secure software development that utilizes automation and Kubernetes on AWS GovCloud.

Getting to the Event

Join the Canonical team at AWS Summit Washington, DC to discuss how to provide customers with solutions that capitalize on the benefits of Open Source with security and compliance.

Register for AWS Summit 2023

Want to learn more? Please stop by booth K26, to speak to our experts and win unique prizes.

Are you interested in setting up a meeting with our team?
Reach out to our Public Sector team at us.gov@canonical.com