SUSECon 2015 Roundup
I’ve been a Linux man through my entire professional life. And I’m excited.
Sure, every vendor conference puts a lot of effort into energizing the faithful; and while SUSECon was no exception, there was enough news, announcements and developments to make a big splash without the need for any posturing. I wanted to give anyone who missed it a roundup of the biggest news and developments from the Dutch conference. (Not that it was all in Dutch, just that it was in Holland.)
A lot of props have to go to Michael Miller, SUSE's VP of Marketing, Global Alliances and Product Management. His mouthful of a title means just what it sounds: he does everything—and he's been a big reason why SUSE Linux is really starting to outgrow their reputation of being just tied to legacy. We've been working closely with Michael for over a year now to build out SUSE's Docker strategy, and the results have been phenomenal.
Actually, for the second year in a row, we were asked to educate the SUSE community on Docker. Check out our sessions: "Using Docker for fun and profit" and "Where and when to use Docker".
(We don't mean to brag, but—well, yeah we're kind of bragging. After all, we're deeper in Docker than anyone else in the SUSE community. Seriously though, there's a lot of meat in those presentations.)Michael Miller is also a big reason why SUSE has dominated the European market—they've been on a killer run in what has been sort of a proving ground for their upcoming surge in the American market.
Here are the biggest takeaways from the conference:The Numbers:
I was impressed. SUSE’s year over year growth (+25% overall but +35% net new) is phenomenal and they’re hiring (26% growth in staff) and growing (+36% operational budget) at a brisk clip. But honestly, that’s not why I’m excited.
The Real Highlights:
- SUSE Enterprise Storage 2: the first enterprise Ceph solution to work with any OS by supporting iSCSI access. There are a lot of things that make this a game changer. See our breakdown here:
- JeOS version 2: the stripped down SUSE Linux distribution that's the perfect base for your containerized or cloud automated workloads.
- Portus: an easy to navigate web interface for authorized access to your Docker registry.
- SUSE Cloud: improvements such as the ability to deploy and manage Docker containers.
- SaltStack-powered SUSE Manager: automate orchestration and configuration management for the datacenter of the future.
- OpenSUSE Leap: the perfect combination of enterprise stability with community development.
It's great to see that SUSE is Docker-ready. They continue to build out the missing pieces to make SUSE the ideal platform for both hosting Docker workloads and serving as a Docker image base, which aren’t trivial changes. Moving to a DevOps model requires new tools to solve complex challenges like:
- Providing a minimal base OS for a container to ensure security.
- Providing tools to effectively deploy and manage a workload in a cloud environment.
- Provide the scalable software-based storage backend to support a cloud environment and the massive growth in unstructured data.
In Amsterdam, SUSE emphasized the good news that, from the mainframe all the way down to embedded devices, SUSE is continuing to invest in the innovative open source projects of tomorrow. If you missed out on SUSECon you can view the keynotes and other videos here.
And if you'd like to learn more about SUSE, Linux, Docker or basically anything else, just ask.