SUSE OpenStack Cloud Technology Preview Takes Flight

We are pleased to announce that as of today we are making a technology preview of a containerized version of SUSE OpenStack Cloud available that will demonstrate a future direction for our product.  The lifecycle management for this technology preview is based on an upstream OpenStack project called Airship, which SUSE has been using and contributing to for some time. This follows our open / open policy of upstream first and community involvement.

Why Airship?

Airship provides a simple flexible declarative approach to defining, deploying and operating an OpenStack Cloud and clouds in general.  Containers are the only unit of software delivery and will simplify upgrades as well as scaling up and scaling down. This also leverages Kubernetes orchestration to deploy and manage OpenStack allowing Airship to take advantage of the capabilities of Kubernetes.  Airship uses established OpenStack projects like OpenStack Helm and others to integrate with the existing community.

Prerequisites for the Technology Preview

The technology preview depends on having SUSE CaaS Platform installed with SUSE Enterprise Storage connected to that installation.  Once this prerequisite has been fulfilled then Airship will take over and deploy the SUSE Containerized OpenStack technology preview.  The full details are in the documentation provided with the delivery of the technology preview.

Do remember that Airship is a new approach to deploying OpenStack and does not use either of the existing lifecycle managers present in the current SUSE OpenStack Cloud releases.  We plan to provide an upgrade path between our existing lifecycle managers to a lifecycle management based on Airship in the SUSE OpenStack Cloud 10 timeline, which is due to launch in the second half of 2020.

How do you participate?

The full details on how to download and participate in the technology preview can be found on the Cloud Beta page at suse.com: https://www.suse.com/betaprogram/containerized-cloud-techpreview/.  This technology preview has a few caveats – this should not be used in production, and our typical support channels are not available for this technology preview.  The beta page mentioned above has the appropriate information to send us email feedback on issues or any feedback so we can improve our future releases.

We encourage you to take a test ride and provide user feedback using the mailing lists detailed on our beta website.  We want to encourage all our test pilots to take our Airship based SUSE technology preview for a test flight and share your flight log with us to make your future commercial flights smooth as silk.

Additional Information

If you need more information please watch the following recorded webcast on the technology preview that was held today.

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/11477/357613