Ubuntu certified

Modified: 05 Nov 2024 18:47 UTC

The Ubuntu Certified Images are designed by Canonical to be optimized for various cloud infrastructures, including the MNX Cloud.

The Certified Images support cloud-init to provide a uniform boot-time setup. MNX Cloud boot script user-script metadata is also available to do per-boot scripting.

You can use Juju to deploy your web applications on MNX-hosted Ubuntu instances. To learn how to configure Juju to work with the MNX Cloud, see Configuring for MNX Cloud in the Juju documentation

MNX-supplied Ubuntu images prior to these Certified Images have some basic differences. The summary of differences section summarizes those differences.

About the Certified Images
18.04 (Bionic) Images
17.10 (Artful) Images
17.04 (Zesty) Images
16.10 (Yakkety) Images
16.04 (Xenial) Images
15.10 (Wily) Images
15.04 (Vivid) Images
14.10 (Utopic) Images
14.04 (Trusty) Images
13.10 (Saucy) Images
12.04 (Precise) Images

About the certified images

The goal of the Ubuntu Certified Images is to work the same way regardless of the cloud infrastructure hosting them. This section describes some basic differences between the Certified Images and the legacy MNX-supplied Ubuntu images.

Default user

In certified images, the default user is ubuntu. You cannot log in as root. However, the ubuntu user is authorized to use sudo to do things as root.

Default disk layout

In certified images, the ephemeral device (data disk) is mounted at /mnt. In MNX-supplied images, the ephemeral device is mounted at /data. The following output of the df command shows the default file system in a Certified Image.

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1       7.5G  745M  6.4G  11% /
none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
udev            493M  4.0K  493M   1% /dev
tmpfs           100M  360K  100M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            498M     0  498M   0% /run/shm
none            100M     0  100M   0% /run/user
/dev/vdb         33G  177M   31G   1% /mnt

Boot-time setup

The certified images can use both cloud-init and MNX boot-time setup.

Initialization data (like cloud-init) is provided as metadata when the instance is created. You can provide this metadata CLI command option --metadata-file (or —script for MNX images).

Cloud-init data is provided as metadata with the cloud-init:user-data key. Triton DataCenter boot-time data is supplied as metadata with the user-data and user-script keys.

cloud-init:user-data is consumed once per instance
user-script is consumed each boot
user-data is consumed each boot

Keep in mind that you may be able to log in to your instance before cloud-init is finished. Complex cloud-init or user-script scripts could take several minutes to complete. Please plan accordingly.

cloud-init examples

cloud-init is the Ubuntu package that handles first-boot initialization of a cloud instance. You can learn more information about cloud-init here and in the cloud-int documentation.

These examples use the [CloudAPI command-line interface](Working with CloudAPI.html). To run these examples, make sure that you are using at least version 7.2.0 of the CloudAPI tools.

cloud-init with a shell script

Anything in the cloud-init:user-data, runs once per instance on the first boot. In this example, the shell script ubuntu.cloud.sh will run on first boot.

ubuntu.cloud.sh does nothing more than to write a message with the current time in /root/output.txt. It should be in the same directory that you run the sdc-createmachine in.

#! /usr/bin/env bash
echo "Hello World.  The time is now $(date -R)!" | tee /root/output.txt

To provision an Ubuntu instance, you would use the sdc-createmachine command like this. 46407334-9096-40ef-bb72-6f9a094f0507 is the UUID of the the Ubuntu 13.10 image.

$ sdc-createmachine --dataset 46407334-9096-40ef-bb72-6f9a094f0507 \
                    --package g3-standard-1-kvm \
                    --metadata-file cloud-init:user-data=./ubuntu.cloud.sh

After the instance is provisioned, you can log in to it and verify that the script ran:

$ sudo cat /root/output.txt
Hello World.  The time is now Fri, 14 Feb 2014 23:15:13 +0000!

cloud-init with a cloud-config command

cloud-init can also take a YAML file that describes how to configure the instance. In this example, cloud.init is a cloud-init config file that:

updates the package list
upgrades installed packages
installs the apache2 package

#cloud-config

apt_update: true
apt_upgrade: true
packages:
  - apache2

To provision an Ubuntu instance, you would use the sdc-createmachine command like this, using the name of the config file.

  sdc-createmachine --dataset 46407334-9096-40ef-bb72-6f9a094f0507 \
                    --package g3-standard-1-kvm \
                    --metadata-file cloud-init:user-data=./cloud.init

After provisioning, you can check that the apache2 packages were installed:

$ dpkg -l | grep apache
ii  apache2       2.4.6-2ubuntu2.1  amd64  Apache HTTP Server
ii  apache2-bin   2.4.6-2ubuntu2.1  amd64  Apache HTTP Server (binary files and modules)
ii  apache2-data  2.4.6-2ubuntu2.1  all    Apache HTTP Server (common files)

Triton user-script example

Any script provided as a user script, will run every time the instance boots. The user script can be provided as the name of a file to the —script option to sdc-createmachine, or as the value of the user-script metadata key.

In this example, the script userscript.sh will run when the instance is provisioned as well as on every reboot.

#! /usr/bin/env bash
echo "Hello World.  The time is now $(date -R)!" | tee /root/joyoutput.txt

Provision the instance:

sdc-createmachine --dataset 46407334-9096-40ef-bb72-6f9a094f0507 \
                  --package g3-standard-1-kvm \
                  --script ./userscript.sh

After provisioning, check the output:

ubuntu@eeac1ea5-0c7f-e445-febc-9ba2883dfe7b:~$ sudo cat /root/joyoutput.txt
Hello World.  The time is now Fri, 14 Feb 2014 22:46:50 +0000!

If you were to reboot the instance a few days later, you would see this:

ubuntu@eeac1ea5-0c7f-e445-febc-9ba2883dfe7b:~$ sudo cat /root/joyoutput.txt
Hello World.  The time is now Tue, 18 Feb 2014 17:12:17 +0000!

Summary of differences

This table summarizes the difference between the Canonical Certified images and the MNX-supplied images.

	MNX-supplied	Canonical-supplied
Default user	root	ubuntu
Disk layout	`/tmp` on separate partition, `/data` is the mount point for the ephemeral device, statically configured fstab	`/tmp` on rootfs, `/mnt` is the mount point for the ephemeral device, dynamic mounts
Boot-time setup	`user-script` metadata	cloud-init
Kernel	Locked	Uses stock Ubuntu virtual kernel

18.04 (Bionic) Images

18.04 20190627.1.1


Name	ubuntu-certified-18.04
Description	Ubuntu 18.04 (20190627.1 64-bit). Certified Ubuntu Server Cloud Image from Canonical.
UUID	9aa48095-da9d-41ca-a094-31d1fb476b98
min_platform	`"7.0": "20150929T232348Z"`


Name	ubuntu-certified-17.10
Description	Ubuntu 17.10 (20180222 64-bit). Certified Ubuntu Server Cloud Image from Canonical.
UUID	0ed8e3fa-154e-4302-8d4e-d74f877dbf37
min_platform	`"7.0": "20150929T232348Z"`


Name	ubuntu-certified-17.04
Description	Ubuntu 17.04 (20171123 64-bit). Certified Ubuntu Server Cloud Image from Canonical.
UUID	76a373ba-be82-4d7c-aa1a-273d8128c6a8
min_platform	`"7.0": "20150929T232348Z"`


Name	ubuntu-certified-16.10
Description	Ubuntu 16.10 (20170619.1 64-bit). Certified Ubuntu Server Cloud Image from Canonical.
UUID	a26713d3-1ba0-4a85-8f37-437097cd8a8b
min_platform	`"7.0": "20150929T232348Z"`


Name	ubuntu-certified-16.04
Description	Ubuntu 16.04 (20190628 64-bit). Certified Ubuntu Server Cloud Image from Canonical.
UUID	616c7421-4b9a-49fe-989e-81eb19232b87
min_platform	`"7.0": "20150929T232348Z"`


Name	ubuntu-certified-14.04
Description	Ubuntu 14.04 (20190514 64-bit). Certified Ubuntu Server Cloud Image from Canonical.
UUID	e7e77246-74fd-4ed7-8fde-a021eafb4d3d
min_platform	`"7.0": "20150929T232348Z"`


Name	ubuntu-certified-12.04
Description	Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS (20170331 64-bit). Certified Ubuntu Server Cloud Image from Canonical.
UUID	c682ea9d-f50a-479c-9271-9b30b8e3110c
min_platform	`"7.0": "20130723T015243Z"`

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