Ubuntu worker nodes for OKE now in Limited Availability

Oracle Kubernetes Engine now supports Ubuntu images for worker nodes natively, with no need for custom images

8 October 2025 – Today Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announced that Ubuntu worker nodes for Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) are now available in Limited Availability. This means that OKE now supports Ubuntu images for worker nodes natively, with no need for custom images. You can find more detail on how to start using these in our documentation.

While applications on Kubernetes run within containers, the underlying operating system and kernel of the worker node still plays a critical role in performance, security, and management. Ubuntu provides a stable, widely-supported and securely-designed host environment that can optimize resource utilization for your Kubernetes workloads. Ubuntu’s familiar tooling also simplifies debugging, maintenance, and integration with existing infrastructure across all the major public clouds, offering a consistent and reliable foundation for your containerized applications. 

With the availability of Ubuntu worker nodes on OKE, developers can now enjoy a consistent Ubuntu experience across worker nodes on the managed Kubernetes offerings of Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle OCI – all without having to build or deploy any custom images.

You can find details on the Ubuntu releases and Kubernetes versions available on OKE in the Ubuntu Availability documentation. 

The latest step in our decade-long partnership

Ubuntu worker images for Oracle OKE users were first released in August 2024. Today’s announcement is the latest step in our efforts to make Ubuntu more accessible across a greater diversity of platforms and environments, particularly for AI/ML use cases or to have a consistent experience across on-premise and other public cloud environments. 

Oracle and Canonical have been close partners since 2015, bringing  Ubuntu images onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Today, all currently-supported Long-Term Support releases of Ubuntu are available on OCI as images for VM instances (see, for example, Ubuntu 24.04).

Get started with Ubuntu OKE nodes

We are working with Oracle to make Ubuntu OKE node pools a fully-integrated experience. We have prepared specific guides on setting these up using the Oracle Cloud Console, CLI and Terraform. 

If you’re interested in using Ubuntu OKE nodes,  please contact your Oracle account or support teams to express interest and explore access to this program. 

If you’d like to share any feedback with us or the Oracle team, we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences, which you can share with us on Discourse.

Ubuntu on OKE worker nodes documentation