Back to Release Notes for SUSE products › Release Notes
Show Contents: Release Notes
Top
  1. 1 SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0
  2. 2 Features
  3. 3 Installation and Upgrade
  4. 4 Technical Information
  5. 5 Legal Notices
SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0

Release Notes

This document provides guidance and an overview of high-level general features and updates for SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0. It describes the capabilities and limitations of SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0.

General documentation can be found at: https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-caasp-1/.

Publication Date: 2017-09-22, Version: 1.0.20170918
1 SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0
1.1 Advantages of SUSE CaaS Platform
1.2 Support and Life Cycle
1.3 Requirements
1.4 Documentation and Other Information
1.5 How to Obtain Source Code
1.6 Support Statement for SUSE CaaS Platform
2 Features
2.1 Transactional Updates
2.2 Administration Dashboard
2.3 Kubernetes
3 Installation and Upgrade
3.1 Installation
3.2 For More Information
4 Technical Information
4.1 Kernel Limits
4.2 File Systems
5 Legal Notices

1 SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0

SUSE CaaS Platform (Container as a Service Platform) combines the benefits of an enterprise ready OS with the agility of an orchestration platform for container development.

The basis of SUSE CaaS Platform is SUSE MicroOS. SUSE MicroOS is a modern Linux Operating System, designed for containers and optimized for large, clustered deployments. SUSE MicroOS inherits the benefits of SUSE Linux Enterprise while redefining the operating system into a small, efficient and reliable distribution.

  • Ready to run out of the box: Not just a Bash login prompt where you need to configure everything

  • Btrfs with snapshots and rollback for transactional updates

  • Read-only file system with OverlayFS for /etc

  • cloud-init for initial configuration (Network, Accounts, Salt)

  • Salt for full system configuration

  • Administration node with dashboard to manage cluster

SUSE MicroOS comes with a novel file system configuration based on Btrfs and OverlayFS:

  • The base OS and snapshots are read-only

  • Subvolumes for data storage are read-write

  • OverlayFS is used for /etc (for cloud-init and Salt)

To manage SUSE MicroOS deployments, cloud-init is used:

  • Very flexible and already well-known by administrators in the cloud environment

  • cloud-init has been enhanced to be able to configure Zypp repositories and read configuration from local directories

1.1 Advantages of SUSE CaaS Platform

SUSE CaaS Platform allows you to provision, manage, and scale container-based applications. SUSE offers an application development and hosting platform for containers that automates the tedious management tasks. This allows you to focus on development and writing apps that meet business goals.

The main benefits of SUSE CaaS Platform are:

  • Enable DevOps and Microservices Applications:  Develop, deploy, and automate modular, reliable, and serviceable applications across infrastructure, regardless of the application's architecture.

  • Enterprise-Grade Security and Scalability:  The foundation of SUSE CaaS Platform is our SUSE Linux Enterprise platform which provides a stable and reliable environment for enterprise applications.

  • Run Everywhere:  You can quickly and intelligently respond to demand across private and public clouds. SUSE CaaS Platform helps you manage peak demand without downtime or manual intervention.

  • Accelerate Business Innovation:  Go faster from concept to production. Give developers and operations teams the tools they need to iterate faster and reduce time between application releases.

1.2 Support and Life Cycle

SUSE CaaS Platform is backed by award-winning support from SUSE, an established technology leader with a proven history of delivering enterprise-quality support services.

The support for version SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0 ends with the release of version 2.0. We offer rolling updates allowing customers to upgrade the system via a maintenance update. When releasing version 2.0, SUSE will offer maintenance updates including packages enabling our customers to move to version 2.0 via a simple update.

For more information, check our Support Policy page https://www.suse.com/support/policy.html.

1.3 Requirements

This section lists requirements that SUSE CaaS Platform has on its running environment and underlying hardware.

1.3.1 Supported Environments

SUSE currently supports clusters of up to 25 nodes (this number will increase in the future). Storage can be provided using SUSE Enterprise Storage, NFS, or hostpath.

Regarding deployment scenarios, SUSE supports SUSE CaaS Platform running:

  • On bare metal: any SLES 12 x86_64 certified hardware

  • Virtualized: running under the following hypervisors: KVM, Xen, VMware, and Hyper-V.

  • On private and public clouds using SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7

1.3.2 System Requirements

SUSE CaaS Platform has the following system requirements:

  • Minimal amount of RAM: 8 GB

  • Minimal file system size for the root file system: 40 GB (as Btrfs with snapshots), additional disk space for containers and container images may be required

  • Minimal file system size for swap: 2 GB (exact size defined by AutoYaST at runtime)

  • Kernel limits are documented in Section 4.1, “Kernel Limits”

  • VNC installations are not supported

1.4 Documentation and Other Information

1.4.1 Available on the Product Media

  • Read the READMEs on the media.

  • Get the detailed change log information about a particular package from the RPM (where <FILENAME>.rpm is the name of the RPM): 

    rpm --changelog -qp <FILENAME>.rpm

  • Check the ChangeLog file in the top level of the media for a chronological log of all changes made to the updated packages.

  • Find more information in the docu directory of the media of SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0.

  • The most recent version is always available online at http://www.suse.com/releasenotes/. Some entries may be listed twice, if they are important and belong to more than one section.

1.4.2 Externally Provided Documentation

Documentation for SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0 is available at https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-caasp-1/.

1.5 How to Obtain Source Code

This SUSE product includes materials licensed to SUSE under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL requires SUSE to provide the source code that corresponds to the GPL-licensed material. The source code is available for download at https://www.suse.com/download-linux/source-code.html.

Also, for up to three years after distribution of the SUSE product, upon request, SUSE will mail a copy of the source code. Requests should be sent by e-mail to mailto:sle_source_request@suse.com or as otherwise instructed at https://www.suse.com/download-linux/source-code.html. SUSE may charge a reasonable fee to recover distribution costs.

1.6 Support Statement for SUSE CaaS Platform

To receive support, you need an appropriate subscription with SUSE. For more information, see https://www.suse.com/products/server/services-and-support/.

The following definitions apply:

L1

Problem determination, which means technical support designed to provide compatibility information, usage support, ongoing maintenance, information gathering and basic troubleshooting using available documentation.

L2

Problem isolation, which means technical support designed to analyze data, reproduce customer problems, isolate problem area and provide a resolution for problems not resolved by Level 1 or prepare for Level 3.

L3

Problem resolution, which means technical support designed to resolve problems by engaging engineering to resolve product defects which have been identified by Level 2 Support.

For contracted customers and partners, SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0 is delivered with L3 support for all packages, except the following:

  • Technology Previews

  • sound, graphics, fonts and artwork

  • packages that require an additional customer contract

  • packages provided as part of the Software Development Kit (SDK)

SUSE will only support the usage of original (that is, unchanged and un-recompiled) packages.

2 Features

2.1 Transactional Updates

A "transactional update" is an atomic update. It is either fully applied or not at all. The update does not influence the running system. The update can be rolled back, this means that if the update fails or if the update is not compatible, you can quickly restore the situation from before the update.

2.2 Administration Dashboard

Velum is the administration dashboard of SUSE Container as a Service Platform, and is the tool to use to deploy and maintain Kubernetes clusters in SUSE Container as a Service Platform. The initial feature set provided by Velum will be compounded by additional features over the life cycle of the product using maintenance updates.

Velum is containerized, and runs on top of the administration node together with additional containers.

Velum is developed in the open at https://github.com/kubic-project/velum/ (https://github.com/kubic-project/velum/).

2.3 Kubernetes

Over the life cycle of a SUSE Container as a Service Platform version, there may be updates to major Kubernetes upstream releases (and some minor releases also). However, the version provided in SUSE Container as a Service Platform will trail the upstream version by up to 6 months, to be able to provide additional QA.

Such version updates will be released as updates within the life of the product. This means there is no concept of overlap support between two versions. Only the latest maintenance update is supported.

The initial version of Kubernetes will be version 1.5.

3 Installation and Upgrade

3.1 Installation

This section includes information related to the initial installation of SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0. For information about installing, see Deployment Guide at https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-caasp-1/.

3.1.1 Installing Systems from Online Repositories

To install CaaS Platform, you need the installation media. If you also mirror the repositories, for example with SMT, this means that effectively you need to download all packages twice: once as a part of the media and additionally from the online repository.

For such scenarios, we provide a package named tftpboot-installation-CAASP-1.0 in the product repositories. This package includes an installer prepared for a network boot environment (PXE).

To use this package, configure the PXE environment (DHCP, TFTP servers) and install the package for the respective product and architecture. Make sure to adjust the included configuration, so that the correct local URLs are passed to the installer.

For more information about the procedure, see the SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0 Deployment Guide at https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-caasp-1/.

3.2 For More Information

For more information, see Section 2, “Features” and the sections relating to your respective hardware architecture.

4 Technical Information

This section contains information about system limits, several technical changes and enhancements for the experienced user.

When talking about CPUs, we use the following terminology:

CPU Socket

The visible physical entity, as it is typically mounted to a mainboard or an equivalent.

CPU Core

The (usually not visible) physical entity as reported by the CPU vendor.

Logical CPU

This is what the Linux Kernel recognizes as a “CPU”.

We avoid the word “thread” (which is sometimes used), as the word “thread” would also become ambiguous subsequently.

Virtual CPU

A logical CPU as seen from within a Virtual Machine.

4.1 Kernel Limits

This table summarizes the various limits which exist in our recent kernels and utilities (if related) for SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0.

SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0 (Linux 4.4) Intel 64/AMD64 (x86-64)

CPU bits

64

Maximum number of logical CPUs

8192

Maximum amount of RAM (theoretical/certified)

> 1 PiB/64 TiB

Maximum amount of user space/kernel space

128 TiB/128 TiB

Maximum amount of swap space

Up to 29 * 64 GB

Maximum number of processes

1048576

Maximum number of threads per process

Upper limit depends on memory and other parameters (tested with more than 120,000).

Maximum size per block device

Up to 8 EiB

FD_SETSIZE

1024

4.2 File Systems

https://www.suse.com/products/server/technical-information/#FileSystem

4.2.1 Comparison of Supported File Systems

SUSE CaaS Platform 1.0 exclusively supports the file system types Btrfs and OverlayFS. The root file system is a read-only Btrfs which enables transactional updates.

+ supported
– unsupported

FeatureBtrfs

Data/metadata journaling

N/A *

Journal internal/external

 

Offline extend/shrink

+ / +

Online extend/shrink

+ / +

Inode allocation map

B-tree

Sparse files

+

Tail packing

+

Defrag

+

ExtAttr/ACLs

+ / +

Quotas

+

Dump/restore

–

Block size default

4 KiB

Maximum file system size

16 EiB

Maximum file size

16 EiB

* Btrfs is a copy-on-write file system. Instead of journaling changes before writing them in-place, it writes them to a new location and then links the new location in. Until the last write, the changes are not “committed”. Because of the nature of the file system, quotas are implemented based on subvolumes (qgroups).

The maximum file size above can be larger than the file system's actual size because of usage of sparse blocks. The numbers in the above tables assume that the file systems are using 4 KiB block size. When using different block sizes, the results are different, but 4 KiB reflects the most common standard.

In this document: 1024 Bytes = 1 KiB; 1024 KiB = 1 MiB; 1024 MiB = 1 GiB; 1024 GiB = 1 TiB; 1024 TiB = 1 PiB; 1024 PiB = 1 EiB. See also http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html.

4.2.2 Supported Btrfs Features

The following table lists supported and unsupported Btrfs features across multiple SUSE CaaS Platform versions.

+ supported
– unsupported

FeatureSUSE CaaS Platform 1.0
Copy on Write+
Snapshots/Subvolumes+
Metadata Integrity+
Data Integrity+
Online Metadata Scrubbing+
Automatic Defragmentation–
Manual Defragmentation+
In-band Deduplication–
Out-of-band Deduplication+
Quota Groups+
Metadata Duplication+
Multiple Devices+
RAID 0+
RAID 1+
RAID 10+
RAID 5–
RAID 6–
Hot Add/Remove+
Device Replace–
Seeding Devices–
Compression+
Big Metadata Blocks+
Skinny Metadata+
Send Without File Data+
Send/Receive+
Inode Cache–
Fallocate with Hole Punch+
Print this page

© 2017 SUSE