Explore 2025: Broadcom and Canonical Expand Partnership to Optimize VMware Cloud Foundation for Modern Container and AI Workloads

Broadcom Inc. and Canonical announced an expanded collaboration to help customers ship modern container-based and AI applications faster and more securely. By bringing together Canonical’s trusted open-source software with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), an unified private cloud platform, this partnership will help customers accelerate innovation, with lower costs and less risk.

“Broadcom has delivered VCF as the industry’s first unified private cloud platform for modern private clouds. Canonical is the trusted leader in open source innovation and the publisher of Ubuntu, the number one Cloud OS,” said Paul Turner, VP products, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, Broadcom. “Together, our partnership will help customers that are building Kubernetes-based modern applications improve developer efficiency, manage security risks, and simplify AI workload deployment.”

“Canonical is partnering with Broadcom to address a long-standing question from customers: innovate or stay secure?” said Regis Paquette, SVP global sales alliances, channels and industry verticals, Canonical. “Now, by bringing enterprise-grade Ubuntu and chiseled Ubuntu containers to the VCF platform, organizations can both innovate at speed and get the reliable security maintenance they need to drive the next wave of enterprise and AI innovation.”

Customers building Kubernetes-based modern applications often face challenges in improving developer efficiency, managing security risks from oversized container images, and simplifying AI workload deployment, especially in air-gapped environments that struggle with external GPU driver dependencies. VCF provides a unified cloud experience to deploy modern containerized apps using vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS). This expanded partnership will provide customers with:

• VMware Cloud Foundation + Ubuntu OS with Enterprise Support: Customers will benefit from enterprise-grade support across the complete stack including Ubuntu OS and Kubernetes-based containers integrated into VCF. This will include expedited security patch management with a robust process to review, prioritize, and fix critical vulnerabilities.

• Better Security and Efficiency with Chiseled Containers: By standardizing on chiseled Ubuntu containers for popular language runtimes such as Python, .NET and Go, enterprise developers will experience faster development-to-production cycles. These lighter container images consume significantly less storage space, leading to optimized resource consumption and accelerated network transfer times when pulling or pushing images to and from registries. Chiseled Ubuntu containers minimize the attack surface by removing unnecessary content from the container.

• Faster AI Deployments with GPU Drivers: Ubuntu images with precompiled virtualized GPU drivers enable customers to achieve simplified deployment and more secure operations even in air-gapped environments, significantly reducing their dependency on external repositories and Internet access. This not only streamlines the development process but also leads to optimal performance, as deployment time and resource consumption are notably reduced by removing the need for on-node driver compilation and sharing of valuable GPU hardware. Elimination of on-node driver compilation optimizes performance and reduces time and resource consumption during deployment.