dbi services is now SUSE Solution Partner. What better way to celebrate that than to attend an event?
Last week I was at the SUSE Expert Days 2019 which took place at the Mövenpick Hotel in Lausanne.

Keynote

After a welcome coffee, keynote speech started with Mauro Beglieri (Global and Enterprise Account Manager). The open-source infrastructure and application delivery vendor is growing worldwide and SUSE ALPS team (Switzerland and Austria) counts now 10 people. From 15th March SUSE is an independent company, in order to have its own strategy no more linked to Micro Focus.
Nowadays there are some barriers to Digital Transformation, such as data growth, new security challenges, programming and deployment models. To handle these issues, SUSE is focused on real-time insight, user requirements, a new deployment strategy and the customer satisfaction. Data management and deployment can be done across 3 different models: the edge, the core and the cloud. How can we make the 3 models live together? SUSE vision is to have 2 blocs:
– some flexibility with software-defined infrastructure
– an application delivery platform
Here the SUSE portfolio:

There is no proprietary solution on all SUSE products.

Cloud Application Platform

Bo Jin (Sales Engineer) presented then the SUSE Cloud Application Platform (CAP).
Containers will become the new infrastructure layer. Docker introduced a standard for containers. Using containers requires an orchestration solution to manage that: Kubernetes.
Cloud Foundry helps developers to push code into the production (cf push).
SUSE is bringing Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes ecosystem in a lightweight way through CAP. CAP is a portable PaaS solution which supports SUSE CaaS Platform, Google GKE, Microsoft AKS and Amazon EKS, so you are not locked into a specific cloud or a Kubernetes stack. This is one important advantage compared to OpenShift, which is only available on RedHat platform.
SUSE contributes to some important Cloud Foundry projects (as originator and/or project leader):
– Stratos (the management UI for Cloud Foundry)
– CF containerization (to run Cloud Foundry itself in Kubernetes, with a smaller footprint than VM)
– Eirini (to run user applications developed with CF containerization)
A SUSE partner presented also an implementation of CAP at a customer (an international organization in Switzerland) with the following lessons at the end:
– separate legacy from Cloud native
– security requirements make things more complex
– backup strategy must be defined in different ways

SLES for SAP and SUSE Manager

As the last session, Christian Pfenninger (Senior Pre-Sales Engineer) presented SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP.

Actually SUSE is the first operating system for SAP HANA. Different deployment options are available: on-premise, on the public or a private Cloud.
In addition, SUSE Linux Enterprise offers support for Intel Optane DC persistent memory, which provides high performances and a faster recovery after a system restart, that means less downtime.
Christian also talked about SUSE Manager, the infrastructure management tool for Linux systems which is useful for configuration management, patching management, monitoring and reporting, security auditing, etc…

Conclusion

The day ended with a lunch with the SUSE team and other participants: it’s always good to share knowledge and have some networking moments! And this is exactly the spirit of dbi services.
The event was very interesting and well prepared, both commercial and technical staff could appreciate it.
With the new trends in the IT/Ops fields such as Open Source, DevOps, Agility, SUSE is becoming an interesting solution. So stay tuned with the chameleon… 😉