From Studio to Manager with a click of your mouse!

SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager are two of the essential building blocks of SUSE’s Cloud story. Both are mature products that provide real value in their own right, whether you are running a “traditional” datacenter or heading for the Cloud.

While SUSE Studio makes it easy to build your own customized Linux instances (aka appliances), test them, and make them available to others, SUSE Manager is the one-stop solution for managing your Linux instances, from provisioning to patch management and monitoring.

Now, wouldn’t it be even better if there was tight integration between those tools? That’s exactly what we are working on.

A first step was to add support in SUSE Studio for building images that automatically register to a SUSE Manager server when they are started for the first time. This even works if you are deploying into a cloud like Amazon’s EC2. The Studio team has already blogged about that. It’s as easy as checking a box on the Configuration/Appliance tab:

The next step is making it possible to deploy appliance images built in SUSE Studio right from SUSE Manager’s virtualization management tab. This feature is almost done and will be shipped as a maintenance update to SUSE Manager. I’ll post some screenshots as soon as the update is out.

And there’s more to come. SUSE Manager and SUSE Studio will play a key role in making our OpenStack-based Cloud infrastructure solution easier to manage and use. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the BrainShare 2011 keynote video!

This is Joachim Werner blogging live from SUSE in Nuremberg, where German Engineering meets Open Source Spirit.