Broadcom and Canonical expand partnership, promising accelerated innovation

Broadcom and Canonical are expanding their partnership, saying they will help customers create container-based and AI applications more quickly and securely, and at lower cost.

“Canonical is the number-one Cloud OS provider in the market with the Ubuntu containers, and VMware by Broadcom, with our VCF Foundation, is the number-one private cloud platform,” said Prashanth Shenoy, VP of product marketing, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) division of Broadcom, during a media briefing. “So those two organizations coming together really helps our customers build Kubernetes-based modern applications.” 

He said that customers can build and ship Kubernetes images more quickly, thanks to Ubuntu chiseled containers that only deliver the application and its runtime dependencies, without any other operating system-level packages, utilities, or libraries. This, he noted, also reduces the application’s attack surface.

The expanded partnership will also provide customers with enterprise-grade support across the entire stack, including the Ubuntu OS and Kubernetes containers integrated into VCF, that incorporates expedited security patch management and a process to review, prioritize, and fix critical vulnerabilities, Broadcom said.

Additionally, Ubuntu images containing precompiled virtualized GPU drivers will help customers simplify deployment, even in air-gapped environments, streamlining the development process, it said.

Questions over renewal

But the move raises questions about the challenges enterprise container users face, said John Annand, practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group.

“Canonical has been promising business value by delivering composable, open-source, and cloud native app development for years now. Partnering with VCF tells me that managing that underlying physical infrastructure with Canonical OpenStack is still a challenge for many of the organizations they’re looking to work with,” he said. 

“The $64,000 question at renewal time, though, will be why continue with Canonical instead of migrating to Tanzu? Despite speculation last year, it seems Broadcom will continue to invest and promote its own internal development platform. Canonical seems to be signaling that they’ll cede the OpenStack and put their bets behind a superior software developer experience.”