During his keynote address at the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth made a surprise product announcement. He took the wraps off a new cloud-in-a-box offering that the company calls the Ubuntu Orange Box. It includes ten micro-servers in a 40-core, 160GB RAM, 1.2TB SSD cluster?all packed into a portable box that weighs less than forty pounds. It comes with Ubuntu 14.04, OpenStack Icehouse, Juju and Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) cloud computing management and deployment tools.
Canonical had intended the boxes to be used for training but has met with unexpectedly high demand from enterprises and small companies who see it as an easy way to deploy a cloud, particularly in remote offices.
At the same event, Ubuntu announced new hosted private cloud offerings and that it had ported its Juju DevOps tools to CentOS and Windows.
