Ubuntu for the Enterprise

Ubuntu Linux has come a very long way from it's early beginnings, but has maintainted true to it's roots...  "I am, who I am, because of who we all are".  The community can help an individual to achieve greater heights than they could alone.  An individual can become greater by contributing to their community and helping others.  Working together and transparently provides the greatest benefit to all.

KVM and Opscode chef are two magnificent Open Source tools that can be leveraged on uBuntu Linux to create a robust, secure and fault-tolerate infrastructure that any Enterprise can benefit from.  The uBuntu Operating System of today, and it's repositories, are  able to directly compete with even the most expensive Operating Systems available on the market.  I will make a strong use case for uBuntu Linux as the platform of choice for modern Enterprises.  I will discuss Opscode Chef and how it can be used to manage Infrastructure on a very large scale.  I will give a brief introduction to virtualization on uBuntu and a few of the available options.  I will discuss KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) by giving a brief introduction to the software, providing simple examples of its use and a general approach to implementation.  

I will discuss the use of Amazon EC2 as a Disaster Recovery environment and make a few recommendations that can ease the transistion into Amazon EC2.  I will discuss some of the challenges of implementing Open Source uBuntu Linux and how to overcome the challenges using Opscode Chef.  I will provide many real-world examples of the importance of virtualization and how a private cloud can greater improve hardware resource utilization.  Many servers running on bare metal see 40% utilization or less, most virtualization infrastructures see between 75-90% utilization.

With an Open Source operating system like uBuntu, we are free of licensing restrictions and have great transparency into the internals of the O.S.  Opscode Chef is a tool that can manage large-scale Infrastructure and is, argueably, more advanced than any other solution available, reagardless of cost.  KVM Server virtualization provides many additional benefits, in addition to hardware utilization, including live migration, Snapshots and fantastic performance.

The basis of this presentation is to define an Infrastructure that can overcome worst-case scenario issues.  An infrastructure that is portable and can be easily moved in its entirety to a separate physical location in a matter of minutes versus the weeks/months it would take with a traditional closed-source, heavily-licensed infrastructure.  An infrastructure that can easily grow and accept change over time.  An infrastructure that is so fault-tolerant upgrades and deployments happen consistently through-out the day.