Canonical joins the Openstack community

OPENSTACK'S 2011.1 Bexar release of its cloud stack is being included in the repositories for Ubuntu 11.04 but only as a technology preview.

Canonical also says it has now formally joined the Openstack community. But because it's only a preview, Canonical will not provide full support for it yet.

That leaves the only other exciting bit of Canonical news of the day being the next release of its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud it created with Eucalyptus Software.

That release date is in April, a factoid mentioned in the same blog post as the Openstack announcement.

Previously former Canonical team members got involved in the Openstack project with Rackspace and there has been an ongoing dialogue between Openstack and Canonical.

Of the Bexar technology preview for 11.04, or Natty Narwhal, Canonical says, "We first want to allow our users to test it and provide us feedback before providing it as a production ready environment."

Canonical adds that it's hoping Bexar will be a base for building out open source based public clouds that include its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud 2 (UEC2) APIs. µ