.NET for Ubuntu hosts and containers is now available on Arm-based platforms

• Canonical and Microsoft collaborate with Arm to enable .NET for Ubuntu hosts and containers on Arm
• Arm, Canonical and Microsoft are collaborating to deliver an improved experience and performance for .NET on Arm
• .NET 6 for Ubuntu 22.04 containers is now supported on Azure Kubernetes Service on Arm
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• The ASP.NET, .NET SDK and .NET runtimes are now available on both AMD64 and Aarch64 architectures
• Canonical continues to release ultra-small OCI-compliant appliance images, without a root user, shell or package manager, for both .NET 7 and ASP.NET runtimes

Canonical is proud to announce the addition of support for Arm® architecture to .NET for Ubuntu. Through this collaboration between Arm, Microsoft and Canonical, innovators worldwide can now enjoy the freedom of a best in class .NET experience on whatever platform best suits their needs. 

With the recent .NET 7 release, the runtime got a significant performance improvement targeting Arm-based platforms, for more information see the Arm64 Performance Improvements in .NET 7 blog post. .NET 7 is available with Ubuntu 22.10 and is ready to power your production containers among other deployment options you might choose. 

Canonical releases ultra-small OCI-compliant appliance images containing .NET and ASP.NET runtimes for Arm

Chiselled Ubuntu containers for .NET and ASP.NET runtime are now available on Arm-based platforms, offering precision-engineered, secure by design (no root, no shell, no package manager) production-aimed containers to the Arm community. These minimal Ubuntu containers for the .NET and ASP.NET runtimes for both AMD64 and Aarch64 architectures are available from the Microsoft Artifact Registry (MCR). To learn more about .NET in Ubuntu and this new breed of minimal containers, read our announcement and .NET 6 launch blog posts, and check out the video from .NET Conf 2022 below.

Unlocking secure and scalable enterprise-grade workloads with .NET on Ubuntu

.NET and Ubuntu follow their specific release cycles with LTS (long-term supported) releases available for both products. The .NET and Ubuntu LTS releases benefit from long-term updates, patches and security maintenance throughout the product’s lifecycle. This enables enterprise-grade workloads to securely operate over an extended period of time. Application developers can deploy their .NET 6 LTS applications on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, across platform architectures and take advantage of enterprise-grade support from Microsoft and Canonical. 

“The combination of Chiselled containers and Arm are game changers for enterprise customer needs on security, performance, and cost. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has been hosting .NET containerized apps for years and has recently expanded to support Arm64 deployments. This partnership seamlessly extends to AKS customers.” said Sean McKenna, Director of Product AKS. 

“The release of Arm64 support in .NET7 on Ubuntu enables performance parity between x86 and the Arm architecture for containerized applications in production environments,” said Bhumik Patel, director of Server Ecosystem Development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm, “This is a significant step forward in providing a seamless cloud native developer experience for building and deploying applications to the new generation of Arm-based compute now offered by leading cloud and server vendors.” 

“Thanks to deep investments in cross-architecture enablement by Canonical and Microsoft, developing and deploying applications to all architectures, including Arm, is a seamless experience. It’s even more obvious when you have hardware diversity between development and production environments.” said Richard Lander, Program Manager, .NET.

Further reading:

• https://ubuntu.com/blog/install-dotnet-on-ubuntu
• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/dotnet-6-is-now-in-ubuntu-2204/
• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/arm64-performance-improvements-in-dotnet-7/
• https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/support
• https://ubuntu.com/support