Shaping industries: the impact of open source in action

Open source powers the world's infrastructure, and it is built commit by commit by a global community. Those individual contributions unite into a vast mosaic. Each shared component becomes part of a foundation that allows pioneering organizations to innovate on common standards.

This edition of Canonical’s monthly newsletter, The Source, celebrates both sides of that equation: the global mosaic of open source software, and the organizations putting it into action.

Exploring new frontiers

Open source is all about collaboration on a global scale. So is space exploration, so it’s fitting that our first use case takes us out of Earth’s atmosphere. The European Space Agency (ESA) is behind missions like Mars Express (Europe’s first Mars orbiter), and Juice (which studies Jupiter’s icy moons). ESA is scaling up the number of missions it supports by 2030, and decided to embrace open source as a means of doing that. They wanted to build a more scalable and unified infrastructure platform that could carry across missions. Open source delivered the freedom to do this.

ESA engaged Canonical to deliver the architecture, design and deployment of Kubernetes and Ceph for persistent storage, along with PostgreSQL and Kafka, needed by the mission control system. Furthermore, the agency has pioneered several AI-driven software solutions for mission operations. For these tools, they turned to Kubeflow and Spark layered over Kubernetes, allowing the team to prioritize mission-critical operational needs rather than the complexities of infrastructure management.

Shared supporting infrastructure for all these services is deployed on MicroCloud for high availability. This new open source stack reduced the number of software licences and costs associated with proprietary software deployments.

In orbit, but still connected to humanity

Open software principles are equally vital in Earth’s orbit. Satellites gather vital information to improve life on Earth, but older hardware often makes it difficult to integrate modern innovations like AI.

Unibap is a space technology provider that aims to make space computing more accessible, by creating hardware that is pre-built with the components needed to perform complicated operations that we take for granted on the earth's surface, whilst also being designed for maximum compatibility with restrictive satellite hardware.

Unibap knew that they would need a Linux OS, given that proprietary solutions would not offer the flexibility needed to accommodate such specialized hardware. They selected Ubuntu, a fact that not only makes us proud, but which should make our community proud. Unibap cited developer mindshare as a key reason for their choice, as well as the fact Ubuntu has been tried and tested in many different environments. Our users and contributors are all a part of that story. So, what have these satellites been up to?

In collaboration with the European Space Agency, Unibap has undertaken three missions in which they allowed developers to book testing slots aboard the host satellite. Over the missions, Ubuntu was used to test over 40 applications involving real-time processing for agriculture, natural disasters, and traffic.

Helping lifesavers and caregivers

People are at the heart of medicine – both the people who deliver care, and the people who receive it.

So where does open source fit in? Healthcare research, critical systems, and medical devices all have open source in their DNA. Starting with research, let’s talk about digital microscopy. Grundium’s Ocus Scanners draw on a vast ecosystem of open source components, running on Ubuntu. Their devices allow physical samples to be scanned in high quality and shared remotely with pathologists, ensuring that physical distance is not a barrier to getting fast results and analysis.

Powering a new age of finance

Open source is also the engine behind modern payment flows. Every time a digital payment settles in milliseconds, a web of technology does the heavy lifting. As financial transactions become instant, global, and embedded into everyday software, open source offers the flexibility for financial institutions to innovate quickly.

To stay competitive, Sicredi, one of Brazil’s largest cooperative financial institutions, moved away from proprietary virtualization in favor of an open source private cloud. By adopting Canonical OpenStack, Sicredi shifted to an infrastructure-as-code model, allowing developers to spin up or decommission virtual machines on demand through APIs. Instead of spending time waiting on infrastructure tasks, engineering teams can focus on building new digital tools for millions of cooperative members.

Building skills for the next generation

Last but certainly not least, open source is a driving force in education, and Tennessee Tech University offers a powerful example. The TNTECH’s Cybersecurity Education, Research, and Outreach Center (CEROC) faced a massive price hike that threatened the infrastructure behind its vital "Cyber Range:" a platform used by thousands of students to learn essential cybersecurity skills. Needing to migrate quickly before their existing licenses expired, CEROC turned to Canonical’s MicroCloud, a lightweight, highly automated open source cloud solution.

Image courtesy of TNTECH

CEROC successfully migrated their entire Cyber Range to MicroCloud in under four weeks without any disruption to classes. This swift adoption of an open source cloud not only averted rising costs, but also provided a stable, user-friendly platform for future cybersecurity professionals in training.

It’s remarkable to get an inside view of how open source is transforming industries; we’re proud to do our part.