> AWS and Digital Ocean run local Ubuntu download servers
I would think that is a cost-saving measure as well.
A hell of a lot of that data would be downloaded by users every day.
Being able to pull it locally saves all that.
Also, it is faster and does provide some security.
> They do not depend on Canonical to run their business.
That depends on how you look at it.
If for some odd reason Canonical vanished tomorrow, that would be
a big problem for both DO and AWS.
They do rely on Canonical developing, fixing upgrading the distros.
I would think that is a cost-saving measure as well. A hell of a lot of that data would be downloaded by users every day. Being able to pull it locally saves all that. Also, it is faster and does provide some security.
> They do not depend on Canonical to run their business.
That depends on how you look at it. If for some odd reason Canonical vanished tomorrow, that would be a big problem for both DO and AWS.
They do rely on Canonical developing, fixing upgrading the distros.
But then Amazon does have their own in-house Linux distro, which is/used to be somewhat associated with RedHat/ Centos https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023
I would expect AWs,Google etc have specific internal only distros that make up the foundation of their cloud business but that is just a guess.