SUSE Update Infrastructure Setup Guide for Cloud Service Providers

Not too long ago, my colleagues Jona Apelbaum (CSP Cloud Architect) and Mike Friesenegger (Solution Architect) published a new SUSE Best Practices document targeting Cloud Service Providers.

The use of cloud resources is one of the fastest growing areas of the IT industry. Often Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a leading use case of public clouds. The public cloud brings with it a “start and use” expectation. This poses a challenge for an Enterprise Linux distribution such as SUSE Linux Enterprise to provide access to the update repositories without formal registration of the operating system installation. In a traditional data center, a SUSE customer would set up a new physical or virtual machine and configure the system to be managed by SUSE Manager, or to connect to a local Repository Mirroring Tool (RMT) or to the SUSE Customer Center (SCC).

However, generating registration entitlements for every instance for use with SCC and providing these to the user does not meet the “fire up and use” expectation. Thus, the new SUSE Update Infrastructure Setup Guide for Cloud Service Providers describes the setup of a recommended infrastructure for providing SUSE products and solutions as on-demand offerings in a cloud environment. Via RMT, you can establish a local cache of the SCC content for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server based products. This allows for central license and repository management. Registration can be fully automated against RMT to meet the expectations in a cloud environment.

The new guide is an optional, but highly recommended element of a Cloud Service Provider’s infrastructure. The setup described can be used for a private cloud or in a public cloud type offering. The update infrastructure scales from small to large cloud installations.

If you want to learn more, just have a look at the new SUSE Best Practices document.

Disclaimer: The text at hand has not been reviewed by a native speaker. If you find typos or language mistakes, please send them to me (meike.chabowski@suse.com) – or if you like them, just keep them and feed them.