Canonical is the latest vendor to get into the business of launching its own distribution of OpenStack. The company has released the aptly named Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack, which was designed to fully automate the creation of a reference OpenStack cloud from bare metal.

According to Canonical, its distribution can enable the construction of a fully managed private cloud in a matter of minutes. Based on its own OpenStack reference architecture and on its experience with Ubuntu, the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution was developed to provide users with a wide range of commercially supported vendor options for storage, software-defined networking (SDN) and hypervisor from Canonical and its OpenStack partners.

The distribution also automates the creation and management of a reference OpenStack based on choices made by the deployment partner or end-customer’s private cloud deployment team.

“The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack reduces the cost of experimenting with OpenStack to zero,” said Federico Lucifredi, product manager for Ubuntu at Canonical, in a prepared statement. “Developers and operators can now rapidly evaluate different vendor technology combinations, quickly iterating their cloud design. Customers will learn more in a week with this tool than in months of manual exploration and consulting engagements.”

The distribution has entered public beta and is free to organizations that need it for no more than 10 physical and 10 virtual machines.

Designed for private cloud deployments, Ubuntu OpenStack is playing in the area in which OpenStack has so far had its greatest success. And it gives private cloud builders another option of OpenStack distributions—a market that also includes distributions from the likes of Red Hat (RHT) and Mirantis.

According to Canonical, the distribution helps enterprises to get the cost savings of private cloud they expect by reducing the time spent on consulting, architecture, dedicated staff hours and operational processes for cloud environments.