Last week I flew out to sunny California to participate in SCaLE 14x and the UbuCon summit. As the name implies this was the 14th annual SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo) and, as always, it didn’t disappoint. Within SCaLE was the UbuCon summit which focused on what’s going on within the Ubuntu community and how to better the community.
While there I got to deliver a talk on Project Spuntik The Sputnik story: innovation at a large company, I also got to hang out with some of the key folks within the Ubuntu and Linux communities. One such person is Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu and Canonical founder. I grabbed some time with Mark between sessions and got to learn about the upcoming 16.04 LTS release (aka Xenial Xerus) due out on April 21st.
Take a gander:
Some of the ground Mark covers
The big stories for 16.04 LTS
- LXD — ultralight VMs that operate like containers and give you the ability to run 100s of VMs on a laptop. Mark’s belief is that this will fundamentally change the way people use their laptops to do distributed development for the cloud.
- Snappy — a very tight packaging format, for Ubuntu desktop and server distros. It provides a much better way of sharing packages than PPAs and Snaps provide a cleaner, faster way of creating packages.
Juju and charms
- Where do Juju charms and snappy intersect? (hint: They’re orthogonal but work well together, charms can use snaps)
OS and services
- The idea is to have the operating system fade into the background so that users can focus instead on services in the cloud eg “give me this service in the cloud” (which juju will allow) or “deliver this set of bits to a whole set of machines ala snappy”
Pau for now…
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 