Riddle me this…

What is the complete name of the current image of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 in Google Compute Engine?

When was the last SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3 image in Microsoft Azure deprecated?

What IP addresses does an on demand SUSE Linux enterprise Server instance running in the ap-southeast-1 region in AWS EC2 access to obtain updates?

Interesting questions, no doubt, for those that work with any of the Public Cloud frameworks and use SUSE Linux Enterprise. In May of this year we announced the image life cycle policy  that is intended to prevent the accidental use of images that are considered a bit on the old side, for whatever reason.

Update 2019-02-16:

A new lifecycle took effect on February 15, 2019

With the deprecation of images the natural question that arises is “What is the latest image?” This is especially important for those that have custom interfaces to launch instances in the cloud or those that use a completely scripted approach to launching instances.

The answers to the questions above are provided by the susepubliccloudinfo service and as promised recently here the details follow.

pint

to the rescue. The Public cloud INformation Tracker (pint) tool available in the SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Public Cloud Module repository, the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Public Cloud channel, or in OBS, in the Cloud:Tools project provided by the python-susepubliccloudinfo package is here to answer your need for information. The tool is developed by the SUSE Public Cloud team on GitHub in the SUSE-Enceladus project and is backed by a REST service on suse.com.

pint provides information about images and the SUSE operated update infrastructure in Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, HP Helion Public Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The SUSE update infrastructure consists of so called region servers that dole out information about the region local update servers to a connecting client, and the update servers themselves. When an instance is launched from a SUSE on demand image the instance will first connect to a region server to obtain the information necessary to find a region local update server. After the information for the update server is known the instance registers itself with the update server to obtain the repository information.

In many cases in the Public Cloud outgoing connections need to be tightly controlled and pint can tell you which IP addresses a SUSE on demand instance will attempt to access to set up repositories. With this information you can set up the appropriate routing to allow outgoing connections on ports 80 and 443.

To answer the 3rd question posed at the beginning, the following two command lines will do the trick:

pint amazon servers –regionserver

This will deliver the information of all the region servers operated in AWS EC2 in XML format. If you add the –json option the results will be delivered in, you guessed it JSON format. Using

pint amazon servers –smt –region=ap-southeast-1

will provide the additional information to answer the question.

The second question is about images. Thus lets take a look at the tricks pint has up it’s sleeve with respect to image information.

pint microsoft images –deprecated –filter=’deprecatedon>20150330,name~sp3′ –json

In this case I am requesting the data to be presented to me in JSON format and I know that the data description for images contains a “deprecatedon” field that I am using to filter the information. I also happen to know that based on the life cycle policy the last SLES 11 SP3 image should have been deprecated by the release of a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP4 image. Finally I happen to know that SLES 11 SP4 was released after March 30th, 2015. I am also filtering on the name of the image to contain the SP3 string. The name filter implies that I know something about he SUSE image naming policy which looks like this

Product-identifier_Date-string_…..

But what if I didn’t know all those things? Well then pint can very simply deliver information about all the deprecated images as follows:

pint microsoft images –deprecated

The output would be in XML format as XML is the default. Leaves us to answer the first question above.

pint google images –active –filter=’name~12′

will do the trick.

In the recent post about Docker and ECS integration a couple of search criteria were mentioned to find specific images. the latest SLES 12 images that contain Docker pre installed and the Amazon EC2 Container Service integrated image. Rather than fishing through the general catalog pint can provide the information.

pint amazon images –filter=’name~ecs’

Provides all the information about the ECS images, and

pint amazon images –filter=’name~suse-sles-12-v20151002′

provides all the information about the latest SLES 12 images. Of course if I would not know the date string of the release date the following will also deliver the information.

pint amazon images –filter=’name~suse-sles-12′ –active

We hope pint will be useful to help you in navigating the information related to SUSE images and the SUSE update infrastructure in the Public Cloud.