After more than a year of development, Canonical Ltd. is finally rolling out the latest version of its popular Linux distribution into general availability with a slew of new features that take direct aim at cloud workloads. Chief among the additions is the first major release of its security-focused homegrown containerization engine.

LXD made its original debut last year with the promise of providing a more capable alternative to Docker – the dominant flavor of the lightweight virtualization format – for organizations used to the power of full-blown hypervisors. The technology is touted as something of a combination of the two that features the small footprint of containers with the advanced management functionality needed to power production applications in the enterprise.

The version now shipping with Ubuntu 15.04 sports the first of those promised features – live migration – which makes it possible to move instances from one server to another without stopping the application running inside. Similar functionality is already available for Docker from a startup called ClusterHQ Inc., but cobbling together a virtualized environment one feature at a time is not particularly appealing when contrasted with a full-blown hypervisor.

Administrators can move containers between various parts of their infrastructure over the virtual routing protocol introduced in the forthcoming “Kilo” edition of OpenStack, which comes bundled with Ubuntu 15.04. That makes the operating system the first to take advantage of the improvements introduced in that release, which include better support for flash memory and the addition of a caching engine to take advantage of that speed hike.

Canonical hopes that the combined package will prove more appealing for the large enterprises and cloud providers operating OpenStack-based environments, over 60 percent of which already run on Ubuntu. The package represents the foundation of its container-centric strategy to expand the adoption of its operating system, which also extends into the connected universe with a recently introduced embedded version designed specifically power emerging categories of devices.