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After a three-month beta testing period, Canonical has announced general availability of Ubuntu Pro, promising even better, timely CVE patches and compliance with a range of regimes such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS.
It will be available to a diverse group of users and promises to be very affordable (or in some cases free).
Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, is keen to highlight its nearly two-decade history of providing timely security updates, and hopes to address a stricter market with its new Pro version.
ubuntu pro
In addition to the 10-year security coverage and optional technical support that Ubuntu users already receive, subscribers to the Pro version 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 versions starting with 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), which became available in April 2016.
Ubuntu Pro has been in beta testing since October last year and several prominent companies such as Nvidia, Google and VMWare have all participated.
As part of the package, Pro users have access to FIPS-certified cryptographic packages, which are generally required by federal governments 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 it workstation up to $500 per year for server, with a 30-day free trial. It’s also available on public cloud marketplaces (like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) with an hourly pricing structure, which Ubuntu says is about 3.5% of the average underlying compute cost.
For personal and small-scale commercial users with up to five machines, such as during the beta period, Ubuntu Pro will remain free, while official members of the Ubuntu community can use Pro on up to 50 machines.