SUSE Impressions From the OpenStack Days Beijing 2017

The following article has been contributed by Qiang Zhao, Software Engineer Desktop, SUSE China.

This year’s OpenStack days were held on July 24-25, 2017 at the China National Convention Center. The event aims at further developing the OpenStack community and volunteer expert groups around the technology. For the first time, OpenStack Days took place in China,  and I had the honor to participate.

SUSE was one of the biggest sponsors of this meeting, and also contributed many excellent conference sessions.

Not only open source companies gave presentations during this conference – also local Chinese companies delivered wonderful keynotes. But back to SUSE: on the first day, Alan Clark, who is the chairman of OpenStack community, inspired the attendees with his excellent keynote titled “Now You Can with SUSE OpenStack Cloud”.

He went into details about what SUSE did in the past years to contribute a complete set of solutions to help customers build a private cloud. And – very important – he explained the values we believe in since the very first day: We are open and transparent since the beginning, we always adopt our technologies to help customer succeed, and we continue contributing value to users. Honestly, I feel this is true. I think SUSE is very different from those companies who first attract users with low prices, to penetrate and in consequence control the market, and after they reached their goal, extort users with high prices.

As to the information exchange of technologies, several keynotes impressed me a lot. Pei Feng Lin, Solution Architect at SUSE, gave a presentation about “Get a Faster Return on Your Private Cloud Investment”, where he introduced the new container product from SUSE.

SUSE Container as a Service (CaaS) Platform is an application development and hosting platform for container-based applications and services that enables customers to provision, manage, and scale container-based applications and services. This easy-to-use container platform includes all required components—orchestration with Kubernetes, microservices and container OS, and configuration—as one solution. With this unified platform, customers can easily build microservices-based container applications that run on an agile container host OS optimized for containerized apps. At the heart of SUSE CaaS Platform is SUSE MicroOS, the microservices and container host OS. With a one-step configuration, SUSE MicroOS provides the necessary agility and performance so customers can quickly setup and add components. SUSE CaaS Platform is definitely a very important addition to the SUSE product portfolio.

The most important booth at the show floor of course was the SUSE booth !

We were happy to be able to offer free German iced beer for everyone to taste 😃.

At noon, good lunch was served – without refreshment you cannot work well 😉.

In conclusion I’d say that, in my view, the cloud computing industry is definitely about to change. Cloud technologies and cloud offerings are developing into resources that we will use every day. The use of cloud computing is growing at fast pace – we realize this daily at SUSE. And I feel really honored to be an active part of this boom and the changing cloud computing landscape.