Composable cloud-native app development
Drive business differentiation with composable, open source cloud-native app development. You don't have to choose between the freedom that composability offers, and the high costs. Canonical offers you a cost-effective approach and the containers, toolchains and development frameworks you need to deliver on your vision.
Why Canonical?
- Standard APIs and fully open source
- Fast remediation for CVEs
- 12-year security maintenance and support commitment
- 20-year track record of reliability
- Hybrid, multi-cloud portfolio
True open source composability
Open source enables you to develop and customize applications to meet your unique business requirements. Consuming available open source lets you move faster. But maintaining open source apps can be costly and time-intensive.
Canonical enables you to benefit from open source in an affordable and convenient way, without lock-in or hidden costs. We support the most popular cloud-native open source projects, offering you upstream innovation with the security assurances you need.
You can use standard APIs and choose among different packaging formats to suit your needs.
Choose your app modernization journey
Deliver cloud-native solutions without being locked into rigid and static frameworks. Select and integrate the components that fit your use case and workflow. Customize, adapt and augment those solutions as your needs evolve. Whether it's greenfield projects or deployments in existing CI/CD systems, our tools are modular enough to meet your specific architecture requirements.
Trusted artifacts for any infrastructure
Consume fully maintained container images for popular open source databases and streaming applications. Enjoy the full benefits of cloud-native architecture without compromising security or compounding operational complexity.
Our database containers are fully OCI-compliant, and can run on any OCI-compliant platform, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Red Hat OpenShift.
Developers love our tools
Access the widest open source library with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and build on FIPS compliant images. Benefit from the same consistent experience everywhere — it's still the same Canonical software you'd find in your laptop, bare metal machines and VMs.
- Build hardened and optimized containers with Rockcraft – so solid, we call them rocks.
- Chisel your containers – trim out what you don't need for maximum efficiency. Chisel is a tool to create minimal Ubuntu containers comprising only the application and its runtime dependencies. It's the Canonical take on distro-less containers.
- Automate application lifecycle management with charms – let Kubernetes operators do the heavy lifting.
Container Build Service
Speed up your modernization journey with our Container Build Service. We deliver container images to your spec, and support on RHEL, VMware, Ubuntu or major public cloud Kubernetes. Contact us for an initial assessment.
Research shows 9 out of 10 companies prefer to pull packages from their OS.
Download our report for insightsLet us handle the dependencies
7 in 10 teams spend more than 6 hours per week on security patching*Source: IDC, 2025, but most are dissatisfied with their ability to fix vulnerabilities quickly.
Managing dependencies is hard, repetitive and not value-creating – why do that? Let your developers focus on new features and develop with the latest and greatest open source, available in Ubuntu's trusted repositories.
We'll handle the security maintenance.
Deploy and move forward
Constant Kubernetes upgrades are a drain on enterprise teams. With us, you can move at your own pace and keep your team focused on innovation, not infrastructure. We ship a Kubernetes LTS every 2 years and provide security updates for 12 full years.
Prefer to move faster? Benefit from upstream releases every four months with 14 months of security maintenance.
Run your apps on your chosen platform
We support our Kubernetes and containers on bare metal, public clouds, OpenStack, Canonical MicroCloud and VMware.
You can also run your workloads across clouds for price performance and flexibility.
Our software operators and orchestration engine help you lower complexity in managing different cloud APIs.
Our public cloud partners
One subscription.
No surprises.
It's easy to do business with us. We offer security maintenance, support and compliance with one transparent subscription.
You get coverage for both your infrastructure and application stack. It's that simple.
What our customers say
“We wanted one service provider for the whole on-premise cloud consisting not only of Kubernetes but also the Ceph storage solution, PostgreSQL and Kafka. These were all the services that were needed and with Canonical we could have one joined-up approach.”
Michael Hawkshaw
ESA Mission Operations Infrastructure IT Service Manager
“Canonical's Charmed Kubernetes delivered on our expectations and made scaling a non-issue.”
Miguel Rodríguez
IT Project Manager, Atresmedia
“Our work with Canonical has been that of a true team partnership, bringing the best out of one another to the extent that our platform is now supporting use cases beyond anything we envisaged when we started this journey.”
Greg McCall
Chief Networks Officer, BT Group
More resources
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Read our guide to container security
The 4S strategy for building and operating containers at scale, securely.
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Learn from our customers: European Space Agency
Read the case study to find out how ESA modernized its infrastructure with Canonical Kubernetes.
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Get your distroless containers from your favorite distro. Read about our approach to minimal containers.