I attended the 2019 edition of SUSE conference which took place in Nashville (TN) April 1-5. This is where SUSE customers, partners and community members gathered to hear about the latest developments in enterprise Linux, OpenStack, CEPH, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry and related open source activity. The theme of this year’s conference was “My Kind of Open” – with an emphasis on developing open source solutions to support digital transformation with hybrid and multi-cloud environment.
At the conference SUSE introduced its open hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities along with the upcoming release of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 (due later in April 2019) to support companies in their transition to software-defined infrastructure. Arm is relatively new in this space but with its broad ecosystem it is well placed to support this transition. Amazon’s recent announcement of EC2 A1 instances combined with the availability of SLES 15 on AWS provide a good base to run workloads with SLES on Arm.
SUSE initial work on Arm started with openSUSE community, building and testing the distribution on Arm platforms using Open Build Service (OBS). For over five years, SUSE has collaborated with Arm and its partners to build Arm 64-bit server ecosystem, taking an active role in enabling Arm standardization efforts with initiatives such as Arm ServerReady. This led to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Arm being available for high-performance computing platforms with recent initiatives such as Catalyst UK, GW4 and OpenHPC.
Industrial automation and IoT is also an area SUSE have seen growing interest with Arm. An example is the recent Knorr-Bremse success story provides a good example of how SLES can be used with low-cost platforms such as Raspberry Pi¹ to deploy and manage monitoring systems in manufacturing environment. SUSE Manager can be used as tool to manage automated deployments and live patching and maintenance of platforms in the field.
We could find Arm-based partner solutions being demonstrated at the exhibition, including:
To keep with tradition, the SUSE band released a number of music parodies throughout the event, including Kubernetes parody and winner of this year’s song contest The Time Has Come – SUSE rocks!
Recordings of sessions and talks are available from SUSECon and more details about SUSE product offering for Arm are also available.
Thanks to SLES being the first fully supported commercial Linux operating system release available for the Raspberry Pi, providing bug and security fixes, feature updates, and technical assistance from SUSE support teams.