Yahoo! needed an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) platform that was separate from its internal platform for its BtoB cloud service. Initially the company was aiming for an in-house implementation, but in 2013, the major version of the Ceph distributed storage platform was not capable of the scale necessary for their BtoB cloud service. Moreover, there were not many examples of its use in Japan and as the service wasaimed at end users, it was not practical for the users themselves to take action in the event of a failure.

Canonical provides commercial support and training for Ubuntu.It has contributed to a wide range of OSS (open source software), and the packages it had put together were more advanced than other Linux distributions.