By default, Ubuntu Server is not very secure:
- Automatic security updates are not enabled
- The 'ufw' firewall is not enabled
- SSH key-based logins have to be explicitly created
- and so on...
For my own personal use, I have followed guides such as http://hardenubuntu.com/ to turn on unattended-upgrades, install fail2ban, etc. But now I am running a business in the cloud and don't want to repeat all these steps manually every time I spin up a new instance. Is there an Ubuntu distro/variant that comes with "production-ready" security and doesn't need to be manually hardened? Solutions using configuration management tools (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc) will also work.
And if there is NOT such a thing, why not?