Alternatives
A Canonical alternative for a ready-made AI cloud
Canonical provides open-source building blocks: Ubuntu, Kubernetes, OpenStack, MAAS and Kubeflow. When teams want those assembled into a multi-tenant AI cloud, here is how FusioNative compares.
Last updated · Fusionative
Short answer
FusioNative is an alternative to assembling a cloud from Canonical's components when you want a ready-made multi-tenant AI or private cloud: tenancy, self-service catalog, quotas, metering and chargeback, GPU and model serving, KubeVirt VMs, Ceph and Cilium delivered as one product, self-hosted or air-gapped.
Why teams look
Why teams look for a Canonical alternative
Components vs product
Canonical covers the open-source stack from bare metal (MAAS) through Ubuntu, OpenStack and Kubernetes to MLOps (Charmed Kubeflow). Customers integrate these into a cloud, often with professional services.
Cloud economics
We found no Canonical product for tenant billing or a customer-facing AI service catalog; teams building GPU services add these themselves.
Checklist
What to look for in a replacement
- Runs self-hosted on your hardware, including sovereign and air-gapped installs, with no SaaS control-plane dependency
- Virtual machines and containers on one platform, so VMs and Kubernetes share operations
- Multi-tenancy with self-service, quotas and metering, not only cluster administration
- GPU and model serving built in, for the AI workloads arriving next
- Storage, networking, security and observability integrated rather than assembled
- A licensing model you can forecast, and a migration path that does not need a big-bang cutover
Fit
Where FusioNative fits as a Canonical alternative
Productized cloud layer
Tenants, catalog, quotas, metering and chargeback out of the box.
AI services
Model serving with vLLM, SGLang, NVIDIA NIM and Ollama under tenant quotas.
Runs on Ubuntu estates
FusioNative runs on Linux and Kubernetes, alongside an Ubuntu-based estate.
When FusioNative is not the right choice
- You want to build and own every layer from open-source components with your own engineering team.
- You need Canonical's long-term OS support and OpenStack IaaS as the primary product.
Migration
How teams move
- 1
Keep the OS layer
Ubuntu servers and MAAS provisioning can remain underneath.
- 2
Add the cloud layer
Deploy FusioNative for tenancy, catalog, metering and AI services.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Does Canonical offer a private AI platform?
Canonical offers Charmed Kubeflow, MLflow and model-serving components on Ubuntu, Kubernetes and OpenStack, and supports private and air-gapped deployments. These are components to assemble rather than a multi-tenant AI cloud product.
Can FusioNative run on Ubuntu?
FusioNative runs on Linux servers and Kubernetes; Ubuntu-based estates are a common starting point.