Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” Released
Junmping straght to the server version, Ubuntu 12.10 offers two new huge improvements: OpenStack and Juju.
OpenStack allows users to create "provate clouds" out of Ubuntu Servers without the costs of outside vendors and equipment. For example, OpenStack can tie together a bunch of Ubuntu servers and make them function as a single multi-petabyte chunk of block storage, using the Ceph distributed storage technology included in OpenStack. Also, OpenStack can take a number of Ubuntu servers and divide them up into different could computing machines. Read more on OpenStack here.
Imaging doing an "apt-get" for services and how easy that would make many setups. That's exactly what Juju is. It takes the pain out of installing applications. For example, if you want ot install a self-hosted Wordpress, Juju would help simplify this. The setup and configuration is handled for you, making it simple and nearly effortless.
This isn't the first relased featuring these two technologies, but it is the first time they have been so tightly tied to one another and the strategy for Ubuntu.