Go ahead OpenStack, make my bay

You might be wondering why I’m paraphrasing Dirty Harry when talking about OpenStack. As I discussed in a previous blog, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 includes support for Magnum, a new service that provides Kubernetes as a Service. The revolver that Dirty Harry used was a … .44 Magnum. And when OpenStack Magnum configures a set of virtual machines to be to be managed by Kubernetes, those VMs are referred to as a “bay“.

In talking with enterprise customers, the most common initial use case for private cloud in the is to provide developers with tools to help improve productivity. At SUSECON 2016, my colleagues Michal Jura and Flavio Castelli explained how Kubernetes and OpenStack work together to enable developers to set up their own clusters to deploy containerized applications. By bringing OpenStack and Kubernetes together organizations can realize three principal advantages:

1. OpenStack with Magnum provides a full multi-tenant environment for Kubernetes which enables any OpenStack user to set up a dedicated Kubernetes cluster.
2. Magnum provides simplified set-up and configuration of Kubernetes compared to native deployments.
3. OpenStack enables auto-scaling for Kubernetes clusters, which provides more operational flexibility.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 is the latest step that SUSE is taking to enable creating and deploying containerized workloads. Later this year, we plan to release a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server that is optimized for hosting Open Container Initiative (OCI) compatible containers, along with more capabilities including CI/CD and full Platform as a Service.

Regarding deploying OpenStack and Kubernetes, I was tempted to close with another Dirty Harry quote – “You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?” But with SUSE engineering behind you, what’s luck got to do with it? *

If you are interested in taking Magnum for a test drive, you can download SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 with an evaluation subscription from SUSE.com.

* I thought about stretching this to a Tina Turner reference, but combining Tina Turner and Dirty Harry in a single blog just seemed wrong.