UShareSoft Announces UForge Appliance Factory Support for the Ubuntu Community

UShareSoft and Canonical, sponsor of the Ubuntu (News - Alert) project, have announced that UShareSoft's UForge Appliance Factory has been enabled to support Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 and the latest 11.04 release. UForge will also be able to support all future versions of Ubuntu.

Utilizing UForge, Ubuntu developers will now be able to assemble and package their applications as cloud-ready appliances, which can help create business ready full stack software images for easy software evaluation and instant Proof-of-Concepts. The software has also been made available on many clouds such as Amazon. As a part of a partnership agreement signed with two companies UShareSoft will provide the Ubuntu Community with UForge Free Tier account with the Ubuntu operating system.

In a release, Nick Barcet, Cloud Solutions Lead at Canonical, said that, “For developers using Ubuntu the UForge Appliance Factory is a major step forward in convenience and speed of getting appliances built and on the cloud. We already know how popular Ubuntu is for cloud-based development and deployment. This will make it at a yet more obvious choice for anyone looking to deploy rapidly and at scale and onto whatever environment they choose.”

James Weir, CTO of UShareSoft added that, “Since the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition, there has been worldwide acceptance of the importance of Ubuntu in the cloud ecosystem. UForge provides complete software governance for developers looking to create and maintain software appliances and image templates for their own cloud initiatives. The partnership between Canonical and UShareSoft means a huge boost in productivity for developers who are ramping up their software to the cloud.”

UForge is a self-service factory designed to automate the creation and configuration of software appliances and image templates. It packages software components into single, self-contained software images which are primed for provisioning to physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. These images make it easy for users to both install and configure. Leveraging UForge's software modelization and automation features, Ubuntu developers can benefit from reduction in manual software integration tasks by almost 80 percent.

Key features of UForge Appliance Factory include a Fine-grained control of software governance and life-cycle management. The software provides support for all the major industry image formats, such as: VMware, ESXi, AMI, EMI, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, OVF, ISO, and many more. UForge can direct publish to multiple cloud platforms, including: VMware vSphere, Amazon EC2, Cloud.com, Eucalyptus, and IBM (News - Alert) CloudBurst. It provides complementary technology for building Elastic Appliances using the Open Appliance Studio framework. Elastic Appliances are “self-deployable” software appliances capable of integrating multiple configuration scenarios and enabling full automation of multi-tier deployments for distributed architectures.

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