One of the perennial problems in the Cloud is knowing what is the most current image and where to find it. Some Clouds provide a nice GUI console, an API, or some combination. But what has been missing is a "dashboard" showing Ubuntu across multiple Clouds.
In that light, I am please to announce that we have a new beta Cloud Image Finder. This page shows where official Ubuntu images are available. As with all betas, we have some kinks to work out, like gathering up links for our Cloud Partners (so clicking an Image ID launches an image). I envision that in the future this locator page will be the default landing page for our Cloud Image Page..
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| https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator |
The need for this page became painfully apparent yesterday as I was working through the fallout of the Ghost Vulnerability (aka CVE 2015-0235). The Cloud Image team had spent a good amount of time pushing our images to AWS, Azure, GCE, Joyent and then notifying our partners like Brightbox, DreamCompute, CloudSigma and VMware of new builds. I realized that we needed a single place for our users to just look and see where the builds are available. And so I hacked up the EC2 Locator page to display other clouds.
Please note: this new page only shows stable releases. We push a lot of images and did not want to confuse things by showing betas, alphas, dailies or the development builds. Rather, this page will only show images that have been put through the complete QA process and are ready for production work loads.
This new locator page is backed by Simple Streams, which is our machine-formatted data service. Simple Streams provides a way of locating images in uniform way across the cloud. Essentially our new Locator Page is just a viewer of the Simple Stream Data.
Hopefully our users will find this new page useful. Feedback is always welcome. Please feel free to drop me a line (utlemming @ ubuntu dot com).