Open source vendor Canonical made another investment in the public cloud market with the announcement of certified Ubuntu Linux images for Google Cloud Platform, a move that comes on the heels of its launch last week of a home-grown Ubuntu OpenStack distribution.

As one of the open source world’s most popular Linux distributions for servers and desktops alike, Ubuntu is already no doubt playing a significant role in Google Cloud Platform, which offers a variety of services for app delivery, data storage and the like. But the availability of certified Ubuntu images for Google‘s (GOOG) platform will make it easier to deploy optimized, up-to-date Ubuntu hosts that can best meet the demands of an enterprise production environment.

The certification is the result of collaboration between Canonical and Google within the context of the Certified Public Cloud program for Ubuntu, Canonical said.

Canonical hopes the certification will lead to further opportunities with Google in the cloud space. “As more enterprises join startups in turning to public cloud environments to run mission critical and scale-out workloads, Google Cloud Platform has quickly established itself as one of the world’s leading contenders for their business,” said Federico Lucifredi, Certified Public Cloud product manager at Canonical. “Bringing Ubuntu to Google Cloud Platform is a logical first step in what we believe will be a great collaboration, benefitting developers and enterprises looking for an easy to use, reliable OS for their cloud deployments.”

The certified Ubuntu images for Google Cloud Platform, which include Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 12.04 LTS and 14.10, are available now in public-beta form. Canonical has not yet said when to expect them to move to general availability.