Canonical Ubuntu 16.04 Livepatch Service

Summary

Ubuntu is featuring its Canonical Livepatch Service on its main website today. To be honest I don't know if this is a new service rollout, or an old service that is being revitalized and/or rebranded/readvertised. More information can be found on it here.

Canonical allows personal users to utilize the service for free for three Ubuntu machines (laptop/desktop, cloud or server). The Livepatch Service sounds like Oracle Ksplice which I have used in the past and which is free for any number of Ubuntu desktop or Fedora desktop machines. I've used the Oracle Ksplice product on desktop machines before and it works very well. It's very useful to be able to apply CVU kernel patch updates without any downtime in this era of high-density deployments such as having 10's or hundreds of LXC Linux containers running on a host. Because of all the density of VM's and containers running on single hosts, the need for these no-downtime live-update services and software is increasing steadily.

Anyway, I boldly signed up for the Canonical Liivepatch Service today for my laptop running Ubuntu 16.04. I'll post updates here on how well the Canonical Livepatch service works out. I can say however that configuring it was "a snap" no pun intended (it's deployed by Canonical's new "snappy package manager").