Ubuntu Pro also provides access to live patches, allowing you to apply Linux kernel updates on the fly without rebooting.
Canonical has announced that is ready for the widespread use of the Ubuntu Pro service (formerly Ubuntu Advantage), which was first released in beta in October 2022 with free subscriptions for personal and commercial use, providing access to extended updates for LTS branches of Ubuntu.
The service provides the opportunity to receive updates with vulnerability fixes for 10 years (regular maintenance period for LTS branches is 5 years) for an additional 23,000 packages, on top of the main repository packages.
For those who are unaware of Ubuntu Pro, they should know that the service is available free to individuals and small businesses with up to 5 physical hosts on your infrastructure (the program also covers all virtual machines hosted on these hosts).
To obtain access tokens for the Ubuntu Profree service, an Ubuntu One account is required (count anyone can get).
Canonical has an 18-year track record of timely security updates to the core Ubuntu operating system, with critical CVEs patched in less than 24 hours on average. Ubuntu Pro coverage covers select critical, high, and medium CVEs for thousands of applications and toolchains, including Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python, Redis, Rust , WordPress, and more.
Ubuntu Pro is available for all versions of Ubuntu LTS starting with 16.04 LTS. It is already in production for large-scale customers offering global services. The beta version has been praised by companies like NVIDIA, Google, Acquia, VMWare, and LaunchDarkly. Since the beta version was announced in October 2022, tens of thousands of Ubuntu users have signed up for the service.
A subscription to Ubuntu Pro (Infra only) covers the base operating system and private cloud components required for full-scale deployments, but excludes new, broader application coverage. It is useful for organizations building private clouds using other guest operating systems for applications.
In addition to providing timely security patchesUbuntu Pro includes tools to manage compliance in regulated and audited environments. The Ubuntu Security Guide (USG) provides access to the best enforcement and compliance standards, such as CIS benchmarks and DISA-STIG profiles.
Ubuntu Pro users can access FIPS certified cryptographic packages needed by all federal government agencies, as well as organizations operating under compliance regimes such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS.
System administration and automatic patching at scale are made easy with Landscape. Ubuntu Pro also includes Livepatch, which fixes high-severity and critical vulnerabilities in the kernel runtime to minimize the need for unplanned reboots of your Ubuntu fleet.
Ubuntu Pro is also available in the markets of its public cloud partners: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It is offered by the hour, billed directly by the cloud, at a price of around 3,5% of the average underlying compute cost.
As it was mentioned already Ubuntu Pro offers official members of the Ubuntu community get free access for up to 50 hosts, while paid subscriptions are $25 per year per workstation and $500 per year per server, plus a 30-day free trial is offered on the snext link.
For users who want to get the extended updates, they can do so from a terminal by running the commands:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-advantage-tools=27.11.2~$(lsb_release -rs).1 pro security status sudo pro attach TOKEN
Where TOKEN is your 30 string token from your Ubuntu Pro subscription. After that we enable maintenance updates with:
sudo pro enable esm-apps --beta
Or you can also carry out this process from the “Software and updates” graphical application (Livepatch tab).
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it about Ubuntu Pro, you can check the details at the following link.