After a three-month beta test period, Canonical has announced the general availability of Professional Ubuntu promises timely, better, and multi-mode compliant CVE patches like HIPAA and PCI-DSS.
It’s set to be made available to a wide variety of user groups, and promises to be exceptionally affordable (or in some cases free).
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, is keen to highlight its nearly two-decade history in which it has delivered timely security updates and hopes to capture a serious market. stricter with the new Pro version.
Professional Ubuntu
In addition to the 10-year security coverage and optional technical support that Ubuntu users already receive, Pro subscribers will unlock an additional 23,000 packages. Coverage extends to “thousands” of applications and toolchains, including Node.js, Python, Rust, and WordPress.
Pro will be available for all LTS instances from 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), available April 2016.
Ubuntu Pro has been in beta testing since last October, and many other well-known companies like Nvidia, Google and VMWare have all participated.
As part of the package, Pro users will be able to access FIPS-certified cryptographic packages, which are commonly required by the Federal Government and other organizations subject to compliance regimes such as FedRAMP, HIPAA and PCI-DSS.
Pricing depends on your use case, ranging from $25 per year for work station up to $500 per year for servers, with a 30-day free trial. It is also available on public cloud marketplaces (such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) with an hourly pricing structure, which Ubuntu says is about 3.5% of the average base compute cost.
For small-scale commercial users and individuals with up to five machines, as during the beta period, Ubuntu Pro remains free, while full-fledged members of the Ubuntu community can use Pro on up to 50 machines.
