Canonical launched a managed applications platform that allows enterprises to have the vendor control their open source applications regardless of what type of infrastructure those applications are running on.

The Canonical Managed Apps platform is launching with the ability to manage 10 cloud-native database and logging, monitoring, and alerting (LMA) applications on multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure or on virtual machines (VMs) running on bare metal, public, or private clouds. The initial applications include databases MySQL, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and ElasticSearch; the Open Source MANO NFV management and orchestration application; the Kafka event streaming platform; the Graylog logging platform; the Prometheus monitoring system; and the Grafana observability platform.

Stephan Fabel, director of product at Canonical, explained that the management platform sits on top of or to the side of the infrastructure platform depending on the infrastructure being used. It acts to enforce the policies and models of that piece of software. The platform itself runs on open source software, and the vendor’s Juju service orchestration tool and underlying Charms deployment model.

Fabel noted it was basically a way for organizations to simplify their application management.

“Your interface with the application will be exactly the same, independent of where that application is running,” Fabel said. “Portions of your applications can be running on [Amazon Web Services], some can be on VMware, some can be on Kubernetes, and some can be on bare metal. The Juju commands to deploy, manage, integrate, and monitor will all look exactly the same.”

Fabel said that the platform was developed in response to the growing use of open source systems by enterprises. He said that because of this proliferation of services, back-end systems are playing a more central role in harmonizing the monitoring and management of these open source platforms. This ties in with a recent survey conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that found cultural challenges and complexity remained stumbling blocks toward further adoption of cloud-native practices.

“This is really about taking the uncertainty around these platforms and systems and making them more certain for enterprises that are rolling out these platforms in production environments,” Fabel said.

Fabel added that the abstraction of that management becomes more important for enterprises as they spread their applications across different infrastructure models. The Canonical platform is also scalable in how much an organization wants to manage itself or have Canonical manage through the platform.

The platform manages the applications with service level agreements (SLAs) for uptime and response. And it also ties into the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure product that Canonical rolled out last year. That program consolidates enterprise security, compliance, and support for up to 10 years.

“We stand ready to transfer back the control to the customer if they want so they are not locked into any sort of management or contract,” Fabel noted. “If they just want to downgrade us to a support position we would essentially hand over the keys and take that support position.”