Canonical Offers Up 12 Year "Everything LTS" For Docker Images

Ubuntu maker Canonical announced "Everything LTS" as a new initiative where for Ubuntu Pro customers they will offer up a twelve year LTS period for any open-source Docker image.

Distroless Docker images built to customer specifications that include upstream software not found in Ubuntu will be covered as well and a commitment to fix critical CVEs within twenty-four hours. This Everything LTS will be supported for Docker images on RHEL, Ubuntu, VMware, and public cloud K8 instances.

Canonical wrote in their Everything LTS announcement today with this 12 year commitment on Docker images:

"Canonical today expanded its LTS offering beyond the ‘deb’ packages of Ubuntu, and launched a new distroless Docker image design-and-build service with 12 year security maintenance of any open source app or dependencies, whether or not that software is already packaged in Ubuntu.
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Canonical’s move to offer ‘Everything LTS’ expands Ubuntu Pro with thousands of new open source upstream components, including today’s latest AI/ML dependencies and tools for machine learning, training and inference, which are maintained as source alongside Ubuntu instead of as ‘deb’ packages. The CVE security maintenance commitment Canonical makes to these open source components facilitates compliance with regulatory baselines like FIPS, FedRAMP, EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), FCC U.S. Cyber Trust Mark and DISA-STIG.

Customers engage Canonical to design a Docker image of an open source application, or a base image that includes all of the open source dependencies to host their proprietary app. They get hardened distroless container images with a minimal attack surface and 12+ years CVE maintenance. The Docker image – an Open Container Initiative (OCI) standard container image format – runs natively on Ubuntu as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), VMware Kubernetes or public cloud K8s. Canonical will support these custom-built images on all of those platforms.

Ubuntu Pro subscriptions include the right to run unlimited ‘Everything LTS’ containers. VMware, RHEL and public cloud hosts are supported at the same price as Ubuntu Pro hosts."

More details on this "Everything LTS" commercial initiative via Ubuntu Pro can be found on the Canonical blog.