Canonical has launched a low-touch, open-source Edge cloud service, MicroCloud, designed for on-premise scalable clusters and Edge deployments with automation in mind.

The company said MicroCloud is repeatable across remote deployments and can be initiated by a single command - effectively providing a functioning cloud in minutes.

The service features over-the-air transactional updates which will roll errors back automatically. It is available from a small three-node to a larger 50-node cluster, and version upgrades are also automatic.

“As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centers, and far and near-edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that,” said Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical. “By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud uses a "lightweight" architecture, so it can be used on both commodity and high-end hardware. Users can run their workloads via Kubernetes or system containers.

Canonical is a major open-source software provider, best known for its Ubuntu offerings.