Next week, members of the open source community will descend upon Denver in hordes unseen since the gold rush that resulted in the city being formed back in the late 1800’s (probably). That’s right, it’s the very first Open Infrastructure Summit – bringing together some of the finest minds across the open source community to discuss, demo and deliberate all things OpenStack, Kubernetes, ONAP, Kata Containers, Airship, Zuul, and much, much more.

We’re particularly excited about this summit as we’ll be unveiling SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 to the world there, having pre-announced it earlier in the month at SUSECON in Nashville. As the first company to produce an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution back in 2012, we continue to work to make OpenStack easier for companies to implement in an enterprise environment, giving a stable, production-ready base for business-critical systems and applications to run on.

Keep it up

SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 is based on the OpenStack Rocky release, so in keeping with my previous theme of songs from the Rocky movies, I thought I’d (unapologetically) throw one more in for good measure. One of the most important things in any enterprise IT infrastructure is monitoring – you need to ensure that you maintain uptime. One of the most essential tools in an enterprise toolkit is monitoring – if you don’t know what’s going on in your infrastructure, how can you keep it up?

The OpenStack project for monitoring is codenamed Monasca, which first appeared in the OpenStack Mitaka release back in 2016. In SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9, we’re now including SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring as part of the SUSE OpenStack Cloud subscription.

Learn to (make your infrastructure) fly

As well as the networking opportunities at the Open Infrastructure Summit, one of the biggest benefits about attendance is the learning opportunities open to all. Many learned members of the community will be sharing their best practices, giving advice on how to get the most out of your infrastructure and helping you learn to fly (or at least learn to make your infrastructure fly). There are some great sessions lined up, including a number on Monasca.

On Tuesday 30^th April, Sumit Jamgade, Witek Bedyk and Joseph Davis will be talking about how scaling should be easy and automatic through the use of Heat and Monasca. It’s an early session, starting at 9am, so make sure that you don’t overindulge at the Marketplace Mixer on the Monday night. That might be quite difficult, especially as the SUSE booth will have some local beers on draft available for you to enjoy (in moderation, of course).

If you’re keen to get involved in the Monasca project, then there are multiple opportunities for you. You could join Witek Bedyk at 10:50am on Tuesday for a Project Update, or at 2:30pm for Project Onboarding.

Leaving on a jet plane?

If you’re leaving on a jet plane to come to Denver (or driving, taking a train, roller blading, travelling by Segway or even hitching), then make sure you come over to the SUSE booth (A3, in easy staggering distance from the coffee lounge) and say hi. Come and talk to one of the SUSE staff about how we can take the stress out of open infrastructure and give you more time to focus on adding strategic value to your business as opposed to just keeping the lights on. You could also pick up one of our new, limited edition stickers to adorn your chosen flat surface, or even a stuffed chameleon for your desk/child/pet (note: desk, child and pet not included).

It seems like analysts, vendors and IT decision makers have been talking about “hybrid cloud” for the longest time. The concept has been around for at least a decade – and that’s a really long time in the IT industry. Is it still important? Absolutely.

Almost every piece of cloud market research I read shows the majority of enterprises are focusing on a hybrid cloud strategy. Why? Because they all need increased agility, innovation and productivity, better cost optimization and improved customer experience.

However, there is a problem. Building hybrid clouds – as well as architecting the applications to take advantage of them – has proved difficult and complex. At least, it has up until now.

What makes hybrid cloud so challenging?

Genuine hybrid clouds involve combining two or more cloud platforms – usually a mix of public and private clouds – into a single entity. Access to these consolidated cloud resources can then be more easily controlled through a unified management environment. The aim is to make it possible to seamlessly move applications or data from one cloud platform to another or even to architect a single workload to span multiple clouds. It also means you can quickly adapt, or expand cloud resources as your business demand changes.

It goes without saying that this is not simply a matter of gluing disparate cloud platforms together. There are numerous practical problems that must be overcome. Here are just a few:

• Additional cloud components, APIs and features are involved
• Integration, interoperability and security issues need addressing
• Monitoring and management tools must be chosen
• More cost points, partner relationships and SLAs need managing

These are not simple issues, but the rewards they offer make them worth the additional effort and investment.

Containers and Kubernetes to the rescue

Containers and Kubernetes are finally providing the workable solution needed to overcome the complexity and difficulties of hybrid clouds. Both are experiencing phenomenal growth in popularity.

Containers make it possible to design efficient cloud-native applications that can easily be moved from one cloud platform to another. That’s a critical factor for any hybrid cloud and a major reason why the container application market is forecast to double between now and 2022[1].

Kubernetes was the first open source project to graduate from the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) in 2015. It really took off in 2017 and has now become the de facto system for orchestration and management of containers. A Kubernetes cluster provides the additional layer of abstraction needed to hide all the complexities and differences of any underlying cloud platform. Because Kubernetes is supported on just about every cloud platform, it makes it possible to deploy, move or run your containerized applications wherever you need them.

There are some additional things you can do to make hybrid clouds even easier. Many customers I talk with prefer using a single consistent Kubernetes environment throughout their hybrid cloud. Using a packaged Kubernetes distribution – such as SUSE CaaS Platform – makes it fast and easy for them to spin up, manage, patch and support Kubernetes clusters wherever they need them.

Others are choosing to use an application development platform that can run on any cloud platform to handle all the heavy lifting for their development and DevOps teams. SUSE Cloud Application Platform is a great example. It combines Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes, giving you the choice of using a full PaaS (Platform as a Service) or using Kubernetes for orchestrating of containers to wherever you need them in your hybrid cloud.

But let me leave you with one further option to consider. Stratos is now available as a rich and flexible web-based UI for Cloud Foundry. It’s already being used with SUSE Cloud Application Platform, as well as other Cloud Foundry Distributions. Why is it relevant?  Because it recognizes Cloud Foundry deployments from any vendor as an endpoint and makes it easier to deploy and manage applications to those endpoints as part of a hybrid cloud (or multi-cloud) game plan. Taking things a stage further, Stratos is designed to be highly customizable and extensible. It can recognize any Kubernetes cluster as an endpoint, which will make it even easier to deploy, monitor and manage containerized applications wherever they’re needed within a hybrid cloud. This raises truly exciting possibilities for the future.

My view is that containers, Kubernetes and new open source projects like Stratos are making life a whole lot easier for any organization with a hybrid cloud strategy.

If you’d like to read more on the subject, please take a look at the white paper: Hybrid Cloud – Overcoming the Challenges and Unlocking the Potential

[1] Source: 451 Research Says Application Containers Market Will Grow to Reach $4.3bn by 2022

How do you say SUSE?

SUSECON 2019 has come and gone and was definitely one for the books. Whether you were able to attend the event in person or not, you can still view plenty of videos and content that was shared at the event.

One of my favorite videos from the week was “How do you say SUSE” -which comically reminded attendees how to properly say “SUSE.” Don’t quite know exactly how to pronounce SUSE? We’ve got you covered….Broadway musical style.

The keynote videos from each day are not to be missed as well as the series of amazing music parody videos that have recently been created. One of the major take-a-ways this year was the recent announcement that as of March 15, not only did SUSE become an independent company, we are now the largest independent open source company in the industry.

Throughout the week, attendees learned how they could use open software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions to reduce costs and complexity, and quickly leverage the latest advancements, and move the business forward while reducing unnecessary risk.

It was a great week full of fun, education, training, and more, and an event you won’t want to miss next year.

Another SUSECON has come and gone, and what an event it was! If you follow us on social media, you’ve seen the amazing, informative and inspiring keynote speakers, pictures of the great parties and videos of people from all over the globe who share our enthusiasm for open source.

My Kind of Open

This year’s theme, “My Kind Of Open,” encompassed everything we love about open source – collaboration, community, flexibility and access to solutions that fit your needs. And best of all no vendor lock-in. To quote SUSE’s President of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing, Michael Miller, “Why should anyone have to be locked in to a one size fits all solution? On the contrary…we want to unlock the inherent power of your uniqueness and enable transformation on your terms. We call it Open-Open.”

SUSE extends that open-open philosophy to our support teams as well. If you are looking for support that is everything you want from open source look no further than SUSE Support. Support the way you want it, when you want it. On your terms.

Don’t Take Our Word for It

SUSECON gave us the opportunity to survey our customer base and find out how they feel about open source in general and in particular SUSE Support.  At the end of the survey, we found that 84%  of the customers surveyed indicated that dependable support was key when implementing open source for the enterprise.

And when it comes to SUSE Support specifically, the results were overwhelmingly positive. Of those surveyed:

• 67% said that SUSE Support was the reason they chose to buy a SUSE open source solution.
• 80% said that having SUSE Support had increased their confidence in using open source solutions.
• 56% said that SUSE Support exceeds their expectations.

If you’d like to contribute to these stats, you can take our survey here.  We welcome your opinion with “open” arms.

Choose Your Kind of SUSE Support

SUSE Support comes in two tiers, standard and priority, giving you the flexibility to choose the level of support that best meets your needs.

For software used in nonproduction and test environments, we offer a SUSE Standard Subscription. With this support option, you receive:

• Access to a live person during business hours, in your local geography
• Access to all updates, patches and security fixes
• Unlimited service requests and access to all SUSE product information, knowledgebase articles and forums

For software used in production environments and business-critical solutions, we recommend the SUSE Priority Subscription. With this support option, you receive:

• All the benefits of the SUSE Standard Subscription
• Access to a live person 24×7, in your geography
• Rapid response times of as little as 60 minutes

Is SUSE Support Your Kind of Open?

With a SUSE Support Solution, you get everything we said we love about open source – collaboration, community, flexibility and access to solutions that fit your needs, plus the added security of support when you need it and on your terms. SUSE Support gives you the confidence you need when implementing an open source solution for your business critical systems. Now, THAT, should be your kind of open.

Find out more about SUSE Support options here.

What is a Cluster?

In software engineering, a cluster resembles a group of nodes that works together to distribute the work load. Additionally clustering helps in fault tolerance, by having a cluster acting as a secondary (backup) to a primary cluster.

What is Master Node in Kubernetes?

A master node is a node which controls and manages a set of worker nodes (workloads runtime) and resembles a cluster in Kubernetes. A master node has the following components to help manage worker nodes:

• Kube-APIServer, which acts as the frontend to the cluster. All external communication to the cluster is via the API-Server.
• Kube-Controller-Manager, which runs a set of controllers for the running cluster. The controller-manager implements governance across the cluster.
• Etcd, the cluster state database.
• Kube Scheduler, which schedules activities to the worker nodes based on events occurring on the etcd. It also holds the nodes resources plan to determine the proper action for the triggered event. For example the scheduler would figure out which worker node will host a newly scheduled POD.

Does this mean that there is no clustering anymore in Kubernetes?

Do we just have master nodes controlling the workloads running on the minion/worker nodes?

The simple answer is no. In Kubernetes world, having a master and a worker/minion node creates a cluster, so you can either create a cluster at the initiation of the master node or Kubernetes will by default create a default cluster for the new master node – every cluster must have at least one master and exactly one active master node running the management of the cluster/worker nodes.

What happens when the master node goes down? Will the workload(s) and worker node(s) go down, too?

…Does this mean we cannot have Kubernetes running with 99.99 availability?

Also no. The solution to this is known as the High Availability Master Node solution.

What is a High Availability Master Node solution?

The objective of the solution is to always avoid orphaning worker/minion node(s) and workload(s) i.e. to always have a master taking care of them and managing them.

Solution principles:

• A cluster will have multiple master nodes.
• Master nodes run in different availability zones
• Only one master node is active and operating the whole set of worker node(s).
• With only one node running as the active master node and the other master nodes running as inactive, on of the inactive nodes takes the lead in case the active node goes down.

How does the worker node communicate with the master node – or actually, the kube-api-server?

Will there be any disruption in communication or business running by the worker nodes?

No, as the worker node is communicating to the current active running API server using a DSN name or a proxy or a load balancer which hide the physical location of the active API server.

Note: it is recommended to keep N as an odd number for delivering high tolerance.

Conclusion:

The Kubernetes master-worker node architecture is already a cluster solution, but for large deployments a cluster can have multiple master nodes to implement high availability solutions.

We just came back from our annual conference SUSECON and the next big SUSE event is just around the corner: SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference 2019.

SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference is SAP’s largest global business technology event. This year’s event is aimed at companies who want to become an intelligent enterprise, driving meaningful business outcomes and support organizational growth.

Learn more

Are you prepared for the future?

This is your opportunity to learn more about the foundation of an intelligent enterprise. Stop by at the SUSE booth (#2246) and talk to our co-exhibiting partners and SUSE about the topics that concern you most.

• Can you deliver a reliable Digital Core?
• How do you ensures reliability and automate SAP HANA failover and recovery?
• Best practices to smoothly Transition to SAP S/4HANA?
• Simple ways to you migrate to Linux for open innovation?
• Cloud is a hot topic. Have you already defined your cloud strategy?
• How do you to accelerate application delivery?
• Learn how simplify container management and control?
• Thinking about orchestrating access to a variety of data sources with SAP Data Hub?

Meet and greet our esteemed co-exhibiting partners!

• syslinkXandria: SAP & cloud management & automation solution empower better service, productivity, innovation, & compliance
• Rev-trac: Reinvent how you do business. Automated Rev Trac SAP change management & control for the digital age
• DATAVARD: SAP HANA & Hadoop integration, Big Data, 21st Century Datamanagement, SAP landscape transformation
• SEP: Backup & disaster recovery solutions to protect cross-platform & heterogeneous IT-environments
• Arch (the creator of Floe): Delight users & customers with awesome SAP e-mails for ERP and SAP S/4HANA
• Protera: Plan & simplify your SAP HANA & SAP S/4HANA journey by leveraging Protera FlexBridge

SUSE Mini Theater

Don’t miss our guest speakers at SUSE Mini Theater with about 30 session covering:

Popular topics:

SAP Applications in the public cloud

SAP Data Hub

SAP HANA on IBM Power

Virtualise your SAP HANA environment

Secure your SAP HANA environment

All you need to know about migrating to S/4HANA

And many more …

Breakout Session

Thursday, May 9, 11 a.m.

ID 86810: The Connected Enterprise – know your customers better

Brent Schroeder, CTO & Dirk Oppenkowski, SAP Alliance Director

How do interact with your customers better? Siloed data create a gap in your ability to know customers. Learn how a connected edge to core to cloud Enterprise can enable you to capture data from existing SAP applications & new cloud native new applications. Anywhere to store & secure the data. Anywhere to analyze and act on the data. Anywhere.

Schedule a meeting for SAPPHIRE NOW

Take advantage of one-on-one time with SUSE experts and subject matter experts to share your needs and learn how we can help.

Request a meeting: sapalliance@suse.com

Meetings are first-come, first-served, so please book early to secure your time slot.

We saddled up and kicked off the first day of SUSECON with a few bangs and heehaws!  Here’s a full recap of the first day of SUSECON.

Keynote

The keynote opened with a new SUSE parody song “My Kind of Open Source” and immediately after President of Strategy, Alliances and Marketing, Michael Miller, took the stage to really hone in on how we are doubling down on open.

“We are asking: Why should anyone have to be locked in to a one size fits all solution? On the contrary…we want to unlock the inherent power of your uniqueness and enable transformation on your terms. We call it Open-Open.”

He then provided a quick overview of the week, SUSECON key points, shouted out our sponsors (BIG THANKS!!!) and then welcomed SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann on stage where he delivered a business review.  A few key take-a-ways:

• As of March 15th we’ve become an independent company. In fact, we are about to be the largest independent open source company in the industry.
• Now, more than ever, we can be 100% sure that there is only one agenda…understanding what our customers and partners need and making it our mission to find the right path to meet those needs.
• Now, we are really well-positioned to pursue both an organic and inorganic set of strategies. For years we’ve been investing heavily in our engineering organization and we’ll continue to do that.
• Our partner eco-system has always been deeply ingrained in our genes as a business, and we will certainly hold on to that. At the same time we are looking to broaden our eco-system and find ways to build new or intensify our work relationships.
• Our revenue growth in FY18 was around 15% so quite substantial and are about to surpass $400m revenue mark as a business. And again also last year we saw revenue growth from all 4 global geographies.
• We invested significantly into expanding the SUSE team across geos and business functions. In the last 12 months alone we added more than 300 people and the entire SUSE team is approaching 1750 heads around the globe.

Nils then exited stage right and Michael welcomed James Staten, VP Forrester to the stage.  James discussed the state of the industry and current market dynamics, the anatomy of the modern IT department, how it has evolved and what the implications of that evolution are.  He dove into why it is a great time to be in Open Source, what the future looks like and finally, shared some advice for IT leaders:

• Start your shift to Customer Obsession
• Drive Digital Transformation to raise EX & CX gains
• Enable business value achievement/improvement agility
• Use evolving customers’ needs to drive your roadmaps & investments
• Shift your culture to an Adaptive Enterprise
• Embrace agility, fail-fast and disruptive moves across all BUs
• Prioritize CX-driven, tech-enabled innovations
• Leverage open source technologies
• Empower technology agility across platforms
• Empower your own solutions across your ecosystem

Michael then shared a few housekeeping items and dismissed everyone to their sessions.

Watch the replays below.

Announcements

First we covered our independence.  As a newly independent company, we are better positioned to deliver open innovation to meet our customers’ needs on their terms.  Get the full release here.

We then introduced new, open hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities and application delivery innovations that enable businesses to support their own customers when, where and how they need. Read more here.

Then, we announced delivering the first enterprise Linux for SAP HANA large instances on Microsoft Azure!  Full release here.

And last, but not least, we announced support for 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, formerly code named “Cascade Lake,” following on the heels of becoming the first enterprise Linux optimized for Intel Optane DC persistent memory with SAP HANA workloads earlier this year.  Learn more.

Videos

Of course SUSECON would not be complete without the release of a few cool parody songs!  Here are the ones we premiered today.

Whew!  We covered a lot in one day but there’s so much more to come!  Attending the event?  Be sure to get on down to the keynote on day 2 where we will hear from Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo of SUSE, Dan Lahl from SAP and Hiro Kishimoto, Ph.D. of Fujitsu.  Not attending?  We’re keeping you up to speed via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and SUSECON.com.

Have you been coveting your very own SUSE chameleon?  How about a pair of SUSE socks?  Or maybe it’s a notebook that you want to take home? The options to turn your office green are endless.  And to jumpstart your journey, the Support team wants to give you $5!

This is your opportunity to share how much SUSE Support makes a difference for your business.  It’s also an opportunity to share how we can do better.  From response times to follow through, we want to hear it all.

And best of all, the survey is a short 7 questions and it’s anonymous! All you need to do is follow these 3 steps:

• Come visit the Support Kiosk
• Scan the QR code on the table stand from your personal device
• Take the 5-minute survey on Support

Show your completed survey to one of the kiosk staff.  They’ll present you with a coupon for $5 off any item at the SUSE Shop. Don’t leave SUSECON without your personal Geeko, socks, notebook or pen!  All for voicing your opinion.

We look forward to seeing you in Nashville!

Oracle and SUSE have a long history of collaboration as technology partners, resulting in an outstanding experience, including improved efficiency, increased performance and security, and higher availability for clients who choose the combination of Oracle products running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).  Hundreds of Oracle applications run on SLES across several product families.  This blog highlights recent certifications on SLES 15 and SLES 12.

Oracle Database:

Oracle Database 12c (12.2.0.1.0) is certified on SLES 15 on x86-64 platforms, after successful completion of Oracle’s extensive certification requirements.  Oracle Database 18c is available on SLES 12, and certification testing with 18c on SLES 15 is in progress.  For IBM Z mainframe systems, Oracle Database 18c is certified with SLES 12.

Oracle Applications and Middleware:

With Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.8 certified on SLES 12, clients can choose from over 100 of the latest applications in the E-Business Suite to enable their organization to make better decisions, reduce costs, and increase performance.  Applications for human capital management, benefits support and analysis, pricing, asset management, financials, manufacturing, inventory management, procurement, and warehouse management are just a sampling of the many E-Business Suite solutions available on SLES.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 12cR2 products are certified on SLES 12. These include Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle’s Identity Management products, Oracle Forms, Oracle’s SOA products, Oracle Business Intelligence, and many more.  Some of the Fusion Middleware products, such as WebLogic Server and GoldenGate and GoldenGate for Big Data, are also available with SLES 12 on IBM Z mainframe servers.  For Java based application requirements, Oracle JDK 8 (64 bit only), is certified with SLES 15.  Newer JDK features are available on SLES 15 via OpenJDK 11.

Arun Singh, lead SUSE engineer for our partnership with Oracle will be presenting at SUSECON.  To learn more about our combined best-in-class offerings, be sure to attend his session:  Oracle Products on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 [TUT1028], at SUSECON in Nashville, on April 2.

For any questions about Oracle and SUSE combined solutions, general partner inquiries or to obtain more information about joining SUSE’s partner program, please send a note to certifications@suse.com.