With
the recent release of the SUSE
Cloud Application Platform
based on Cloud
Foundry and
Kubernetes,
you might be wondering what benefits SUSE brings to these open source
projects. Let me share with you some details about being a trusted
source and enterprise-ready.
SUSE
has been a major player in the
open source industry for over 25
years, and our longstanding success is rooted deeply in this circle
of trust. SUSE knows open source. And we know what it means to be
enterprise ready. We have repeatedly and successfully turned open
source technologies into powerful enterprise-class software solutions
you use today.
Key to our success, we have an innovative software management stack
that is enterprise grade, we have a powerful build model that
enhances our abilities to deliver enterprise-ready software, and we
deliver enhanced security protection across the whole stack. But
most importantly our engineers
are trained and certified and ready to serve you.
With
SUSE Cloud Application Platform, SUSE brings this model of trusted,
enterprise-grade, open source software to your application delivery
teams. You get a complete, open source solution with everything
needed to accelerate application delivery, including SUSE
Cloud Foundry,
Stratos
UI, SUSE
CaaS Platform (our
Kubernetes distribution), and SUSE
Enterprise Storage.
This is a first of its kind built
and running on Kubernetes. If you missed what all that means read
this blog post about Applying
the Cloud Foundry workflow to Kubernetes.
SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server is at the core of the technologies we have
created. The package management has been enhanced for containers. We
have built an enterprise-grade container host OS called MicroOS which
utilizes the enhancements. Updates for MicroOS are released on a
continuous delivery model as transactional updates. These updates are
atomic, don't influence the running system, and can be rolled back in
the event you need to. The system can be manually rebooted to
activate the changes that were applied from any updates, or be set up
to reboot automatically on a scheduled basis through the rebootmgr
tool. Everything delivered is signed and verified from SUSE sources.
These features make MicroOS an ideal infrastructure for running
Kubernetes, by addressing key reliability,
availability, serviceability
(RAS) and security requirements
for
any enterprise environment. You can read further at the openSUSE
Kubic project portal
which is the upstream project for Container as a Service Platform.
Many
developers today are comfortable building containers on linux
variants that are not enterprise hardened, but those same containers
will most likely be unacceptable in production environments. When
you use SUSE Cloud Application Platform, you can be
assured that your application is built on containers
using SUSE
Linux Enterprise base images, and you
know that your container will make
it out of dev/test and into production without any trouble. We
utilize our powerful build model and the Open
Build Service to
build our base container images using KIWI.
These container images are built, signed, and verified in the Open
Build Service, and then each image is signed and readied for a
public/private notary.
Moving
up the SUSE Cloud Application Platform stack, you’ll see how we’ve
carried our trademark enterprise-grade value further, into SUSE Cloud
Foundry. Signed and readied SUSE images are used as our base for the
SUSE Cloud Foundry Fissile
Stem Cell that runs both the Cloud Foundry application stack and
Build Packs. On top of all of that, these OCI compliant images
can be used to implement your
application, or a third party application, without the hassle of
stripping the base image
down and recreating it.
The
SUSE build model, utilizing the Open Build Service and other open
source software gives
us the advantage of having a fully
secured, tested, signed, and
verified delivery of the entire
SUSE Cloud Application Platform, from source to image to notary and
into your hands. These sources go through hundreds of quality
assurance models daily in our openQA
tool as part of our pipeline delivery.
And,
while we’re on the absolutely critical topic of security, let’s
recognize that there’s more to that than secure images. The whole
SUSE Cloud Application Platform solution has been designed and
delivered with security in mind. We fully support and integrate
Apparmor on the container host (MicroOS). We also
support the implementation of UEFI
Secure
Boot,
cryptographically
hashing of all files,
as well as a read-only root file
system. Further hardening can be applied by following our hardening
guide for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Finally,
and perhaps most importantly, we are here to help. We have trained
and certified support engineers ready to jump in on a moment’s
notice to dig you out of trouble. That’s part of our core mission
here at SUSE. We have available many different support offerings from
dedicated to semi-dedicated premium engineers that can work directly
with your teams.
SUSE
is the trusted source for your Cloud Foundry PaaS.
Our complete solution will give you everything you need to streamline
lifecycle management of traditional and new cloud native
applications. This platform facilitates DevOps process integration to
accelerate innovation, improve IT responsiveness, and maximize return
on investment.
Have
a lot of fun!