Yet unlocking these benefits is difficult when many IT leaders haven’t adequately factored the prevalence of containers and Kubernetes in their multi-cloud strategy. As a result, while they will undoubtedly have differing Kubernetes distributions in their environment, they may lack a unified platform for managing, governing, and having visibility of the varied distributions.

In the same way that Linux became the data center’s operating system, Kubernetes is now widely regarded as the operating system of the hybrid and multi-cloud – ultimately because Kubernetes makes it easier to manage software complexity.

In the early days of Kubernetes, companies would have experimented with a DIY Kubernetes stack to run cloud native applications. However, as these enterprise applications became more complex, it became harder to manage them. Today, the cloud and container market has matured significantly, so now it’s time for enterprises to rethink their Kubernetes approach.

What do IT leaders want from a Kubernetes platform?

IT leaders love Kubernetes because it fosters innovation. It helps to significantly increase the agility and efficiency of their software development teams, enabling them to reduce the time and complexity associated with putting differentiated applications into production.

According to SUSE’s report, 42% of organisations currently run containers for production workloads, with a further 41% planning to do so in the next 12 months. 57% of organisations that are running containers for production workloads use Kubernetes.

There has been an ongoing evolution in the build vs. buy debate regarding a Kubernetes platform. The survey found that 66% of IT leaders now prefer a commercially curated and supported distribution of an open-source Kubernetes platform vs a homegrown Kubernetes platform.

This is a significant shift from just last year, where 87% of IT leaders still preferred a DIY approach. What has changed? Is the growing complexity of applications becoming too difficult to manage? Is it due to a shortage of Kubernetes skillsets? Is it due to implementation cost?

What we do know is that IT leaders are embracing open source. When IT leaders were asked for the factors, they look for in a Kubernetes platform, the top three were:

• fully open source (36%)
• support for multi-cluster and edge deployments (34%)
• ease of installation (34%).

Development and operations teams are pivotal to innovation. However, it is also quite well known that the priorities of these two teams can be diametrically opposed, and for good reason. Development teams want to focus on writing code and rolling out their applications quickly. Operations teams work hard to manage stability, security and control their computing environments. We can call this the agility-stability paradox. How do we create a balance between the freedom to innovate and ease of management and governance?

Kubernetes can help to cope with these competing desires between development and operations teams by decoupling application development and operational stability. As a result, development teams can build what they need, optimized for innovation while still aligning to continuous delivery and automation processes defined by the operations teams. To do this successfully, companies need to leverage an enterprise Kubernetes management platform. Such a platform must be able to meet key requirements that will foster innovation and collaboration between development and operations teams.

The platform should provide development teams with a rich catalog of services for building, deploying, and scaling containerized applications, app packaging, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, and service mesh. It should also empower operations teams to automate processes and apply a consistent set of operational, governance and security policies for their Kubernetes clusters which may be running on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution, in the data center, in the cloud or at the edge.

Where are you on your Kubernetes adoption journey, and which factors are most important for you in a Kubernetes platform? How do you envision development and operations teams using a Kubernetes platform in your organisation? What priority do you place on the value of open source solutions for giving you the freedom to innovate everywhere?

If you have questions about the best routes to Kubernetes-based systems, why not download A Buyer’s Guide to Enterprise Kubernetes Management Platforms from SUSE? The document covers security policy, shared tools, and cluster operations in K8S environments, plus answers to many more issues that should be considered for fully-containerized workloads to be placed into production.

This article was written in conjunction with Vishal Ghariwala, Chief Technology Officer for SUSE for the APJ and Greater China regions. Vishal also appears on the Tech Means Business podcast, where he shares his experience and expertize in Kubernetes deployment.

The post Fostering Innovation with a Kubernetes Platform appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The new addition to the SUSE family puts the duo firmly on the table for organizations looking to deploy Kubernetes-based containers into production. It sets it apart from the other players in the enterprise technology space as a company that is looking to the future — a significant portion of the future’s critical applications and services will run on microservices.

Tech Wire Asia spoke exclusively to Phillip Miltiades, President of Asia Pacific & Japan, SUSE. We turned first to how SUSE might position the capabilities of its new acquisition among its offerings.

“The acquisition of Rancher has expanded SUSE’s portfolio and created the opportunity to revisit our offerings to best serve our customers. Among the many stakeholders we serve, application developers remain key to our go-to-market strategy, and we want to continue providing the best possible experience for them.

Our Rancher plus native Kubernetes-based CI/CD and GitOps offerings represent a superior alternative by providing developers with a richer toolset and greater flexibility. Our goal is to give real freedom to developers to use the tools they feel comfortable with and still get the efficiencies of container-based deployments at scale for the modern era.

That’s the combined value of SUSE and Rancher: staying truly open whilst providing the tools to innovate everywhere.”

In our conversation, the development community’s role came up several times. Phillip was quick to name-check developers:

“Software developers, or Innovation Heroes as I like to call them, are the life blood of open source. The creation and evolution of products, such as Linux, that benefit the many are only possible due to this community […] SUSE has always had a strong developer focus, and now with our acquisition of Rancher and ongoing commitment to openness, we will expand our focus on next generation projects, supporting the development of new products for the enterprise.”

As a leading platform for Kubernetes-based container deployment and management, Rancher comes to SUSE with a highly active user base numbering over 37,000, with 100 million downloads of the platform to date.

Rancher’s advantages include the ability to deploy complete software stacks regardless of infrastructure, across on-premise, public and private clouds. This flexibility echoes the agile stance that businesses want to adopt innovation in product design and will chime well with companies not committing 100% to cloud-only.

But if organizations are remaining conservative regarding a move to a cloud-only topology, surely the same conservatism applies to deploying new technologies in production, like containers & microservices? Phillip countered this opinion:

Phillip Miltiades, President of Asia Pacific & Japan, SUSE – Source: SUSE

“There is no doubt container adoption will grow significantly. According to Gartner, ‘by 2025, more than 85% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 35% in 2019.’

“This rapid adoption is driven by the efficacy of containers in deploying and maintaining applications that are not dependent on baseline infrastructure or need very little compute power to perform. Put simply, containers and Kubernetes are the future of IT Application Lifecycle management.”

Assuming containers’ versatility, scalability, and ease of deployment will begin to dominate the enterprise application space, we asked Miltiades why organizations would choose Rancher in this regard? After all, there are several battle-proven container orchestration platforms in use.

“Well, first, Rancher is a market leader having been recognized as such by Forrester Research in their recent Multi-Cloud Container Development Platforms Wave report. And, with over 100 million downloads it is certainly the most widely adopted.

Secondly, no one wants to be locked into a single vendor approach, SUSE is about flexibility, openness and scalability – it enables our customers to innovate where they like without the headaches of being locked into one way of doing things.”

Phillip then touched on the fact that Rancher runs on any certified Kubernetes distribution. This means new users can start with any distribution and get all the benefits of Rancher. Plus, the platform can deploy Kubernetes on-premises, in the cloud, on the edge, safely, with no lock-in to one vendor’s technology.

The question of safety has come up several times in recent years, such as when a deep dive into the Docker repositories found many malware instances among unmaintained containers in the archives. We asked Phillip about changes that might be necessary to a company’s cybersecurity posture when deploying container technology at large:

“Cybersecurity remains a core tenet of SUSE’s strategy for both our Linux and Kubernetes solutions. Cybersecurity in a cloud native world is vastly different from traditional IT security and needs to be handled across the entire lifecycle of the user experience.

“IT can no longer look at specific layers or choke points that hackers exploit but must take an approach to assemble the entire cloud stack from the Operating System, to containers and Kubernetes, to the application and through to the user itself.”

The SUSE offering, now with Rancher, provides significant advantages from the security standpoint alone. But there are business “wins” of an even grander scale.

Rancher is the only solution to provide full lifecycle management of public cloud distributions. Users can leverage the best of all public clouds without being tied to any single cloud. Furthermore, for edge environments, Rancher is the only solution designed to support very large clusters of up to a million instances, making it possible for users to develop, deploy, and manage edge applications at a massive scale.

As many enterprises look to more localized nodes for faster, lower latency provision of services, it’s this type of forward-thinking that many will find attractive. Positive “customer experiences” start with speed and responsiveness of software, so putting services close-by will make increasing sense in the next few years; and Rancher and SUSE are pushing that vision already today.

To find out more about how SUSE helps organizations like yours deploy quickly, safely and at scale on enterprise-grade OS and platforms, get in touch with a representative near you.

The post Why businesses develop a container-first approach for success: SUSE’s view appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Combining these requirements in line with an organisation’s overall need to respond quickly and, at times, with huge capacity, means many are using cloud computing to provide the ability to cope with the sudden demand.

Beyond “burst scaling”, however, hybrid cloud models offer organisations significant advantages over legacy data centre-based solutions. But the feeling among many IT decision-makers is that increasing infrastructure complexity will push the burden of management to the fore of operations for their existing staff and resources, and be a distraction from ongoing business support and enablement.

The hybrid cloud journey

A webinar available here from SUSE shows those same IT decision-makers that progression to a hybrid cloud computing model need not be undertaken as a sudden jump. In fact, a gradual approach is advisable. By letting the business’s cadences and requirements dictate the waypoints, an evolutionary journey to the hybrid cloud (a mixture of multi-cloud, public and private data centres, on-premise and edge) will achieve better outcomes.

Jeff Reser and Ron Nunan of SUSE take the audience through a process that considers what should be at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds: the strategies, considerations and potential missteps that they may face when looking to a hybrid cloud topology.

In general, longer-term adoption and evaluation of hybrid should be combined with skills development for staff and allow the IT function to drive cultural changes across the broader enterprise. It is not, Ron says, a decision and process that is taken by IT alone.

Getting the basics right

Modernising the IT stack in 2021 need not involve adding complexity as new cloud-based systems and processes integrate with existing provisions. With the right method, interoperability can be monitored, security policy maintained, and service level agreements still adhered to. That creates a situation in which services that have transitioned can be gradually brought into production, with constant evaluation and monitoring to ensure availability and compliance.

Ron Nunan (SUSE Public Cloud) outlined some of the applications and services in typical use in the enterprise that might be best suited for initial cloud deployment. Prioritising particular workloads or services for the initial steps into the cloud is one of the easier wins, he said. Scalable, compute-intensive applications are a natural fit, as are any existing containerised applications. Good candidates also include specialist provisions that could not previously scale without significant extra resources.

To ensure interoperability, a Hybrid Cloud Management platform can provide the necessary oversight. Such systems abstract control away from the data layer, and therefore mask the underlying cloud and local infrastructure combinations. HCM solutions rely on shared and consistent APIs between public and private clouds, microservices, more traditional monolithic services, and application instances. APIs are critical, especially so when microservice-based applications move into production. Furthermore, platform- and cloud-agnosticism are reliant on API frameworks, as is scalability. Develop once, deploy everywhere was a recurring theme throughout the 40-minute event.

Two additional elements to a successful cloud journey became apparent: orchestrating and managing cloud-native containerised applications requires a cloud-first application platform such as Cloud Foundry as a management system, ideally running industry gold-standard Kubernetes. Use of K8s maintains interoperability between competing cloud providers, ensuring that cost levels can be minimised continuously by migrating to different clouds when necessary.

A recurring theme was that of the elements of complexity that might be encountered should the organisation not properly consider available partners and platforms. It was suggested that enterprises leverage SUSE’s Cloud Application Platform, which provides cloud solution deployment management and a stress-free platform for container and Kubernetes management.

Outcomes

For IT decision-makers unsure of how to utilise cloud’s advantages without having to retool and reskill, as well as commit significant resources, we recommend this on-demand webinar as a valuable source of insight.

You will learn how to transform your business operations without negative impact during the journey to hybrid cloud and so provide reliability and valuable ability to scale. However, doing so needs an understanding of the trade-offs between the data centre, multi-cloud and edge computing, and which combinations are optimal for best performance.

Converged container and virtual infrastructures have the advantage of being deployable not as and where technology dictates, but instead according to business need. Managing such infrastructures from a single point of control needs the right platforms, and that enterprise-wide change in mindset SUSE’s Ron Nunan stressed.

For decision-makers who know that hybrid computing is the best way to combine the best in local security and management with cloud’s agility and cost-effectiveness, this webinar is an invaluable resource from which to learn.

The post Hybrid cloud webinar with SUSE: The future is demanding appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The company behind a global community of thousands of developers is offering a series of webinars that show companies and businesses of all sizes and industries just how business outcomes can be improved using technology. The webinars also highlight the benefit of simultaneously lowering costs and increasing overall portability and agility of solutions.

The webinar series shows how open-source technologies can be leveraged in the midst and aftermath of the pandemic to address the significant issues of the day: big data, machine-learning, quicker application delivery and hybrid cloud environments, to name just a few.

In this article, Tech Wire Asia focuses on “Artificial Intelligence — Addressing the Challenges of Today’s Data Scientists”, part of the SUSE Solution Webinar Series. With Jeff Reser (SUSE Solutions) and Alessandro Festa (SUSE Product Manager, AI), you’ll learn how a fully AI-focused stack can take raw data and then leverage data science and predictive modelling to produce practical, focused outcomes for a range of verticals, including pharma, the public sector, automotive, and manufacturing.

Even large enterprises have often sidelined the extreme complexities of data science as R&D projects. SUSE will show you how all that can change through a holistic approach to make significant improvements in many areas of your business by simplifying the AI infrastructure.

The webinar addresses the clear differences between DevOps and Data Science and explains how an environment can be built to rapidly produce results with much-reduced time-to-production compared to traditional methodologies. By unifying big data analysis and processing with development activities, organisations can use their data resources to astounding effect.

Attendees will learn how multiple pipelines can be made to run in different environments using automated workflows and powerful templating options, orchestrated by the dedicated technology of the SUSE AI Orchestrator and other open-source solutions. Pipelines can be run on in-house, hybrid or fully cloud-based applications without retooling or interrupting workflows. Pre-built automation workflows leverage HPC and containers regardless of their deployment types; as a result, the length of development-test-production cycles is hugely reduced.

This series of uncertain times webinars shows business professionals how new technologies can be put to practical use, giving guidance as to how the latest, research-driven methods can be deployed in real-world settings. From scaling with rapid container deployments, maximising SAP effectiveness, deploying solutions across hybrid clouds, or using machine-learning on data resources, the webinar series will both challenge and inform.

Join your fellow business decision-makers online and discover how, even in this unprecedented period, some of the world’s best technology will accelerate your digital transformation using open-source.

Click here to see the full range of webinars and materials, and help put the past few months of uncertainty behind you.

The post Webinar: AI – Addressing the Challenges of Today’s Data appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Many of those new technologies and platforms rely on abstraction, that is, removing underlying complexities by presenting services ready for one-click deployment of oftentimes highly-sophisticated software.

One such is open-source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service, a platform that’s straightforward for developers: just push the code to Cloud Foundry for automated deployment and management!

Cloud Foundry supports applications for cloud deployment that can be written in practically any language, and in most frameworks. That gives enterprise developers the ability to use the best language for each job. Staff’s existing skillsets produce applications, updates and new products, all by using familiar tools they are familiar with.

Cloud Foundry configures the deployment environment, provides the required dependencies and binds applications to needed services, all automatically. It monitors applications, and restarts failed instances, too. IT pros spend less time fixing issues and chasing red-flags, keeping mission-critical applications running more easily.

It’s simple to manage deployments across multiple environments with Cloud Foundry, too. From development through test, to staging and production, development can be easily switched and progressed without retooling or providing new resource types.

Using Cloud Foundry dramatically reduces both application development cycle times, and also costs.  Cloud Foundry users report* an average reduction in application time-to-market of 10 weeks, and an average cost saving of $100,00 per application development cycle.

Until recently, however, Cloud Foundry has been expensive to operate because of costs associated with Cloud Foundry’s complicated deployment requirements. Also, setup & management costs are high; now, that’s changing.

Open-source business software providers SUSE has produced a solution that allows IT teams to get the power of Cloud Foundry much more easily. SUSE Cloud Application Platform packages Cloud Foundry in lightweight containers, meaning fewer required resources. Memory use is more efficient, and the platform scales quicker on finite resources. The benefits amount to much lower running costs, and faster time to production. But that’s just the beginning.

With the end-goal of quicker delivery of meaningful software projects that accelerate innovation, developers are looking for better ways to respond to the challenges of faster development iterations and shorter times to production. The release of SUSE Cloud Application Platform 2.0 supports those efforts.

It provides full application lifecycle automation, enables enterprises to shrink release cycles from months to minutes, and invokes continuous improvements to customer experiences. With CAP 2.0, the business’s requirement for agility in software delivery is more achievable.

SUSE’s Cloud Application Platform 2.0 opens an accelerated path for existing Cloud Foundry users to move to Kubernetes-based architecture. That’s achieved by a new Kubernetes Operator that enables easier deployment and management of the Cloud Foundry platform on Kubernetes. The 2.0 release is also simpler to install and operate on Kubernetes platforms anywhere; on premise and in the cloud.

With SUSE Cloud Application Platform, Cloud Foundry’s abstraction of underlying complexity combines with Kubernetes’ flexibility, plus, it’s all based on industry-standard open source tools and code. That means portability and platform agnosticism.

“SUSE provides high productivity solutions for cloud-native application delivery,” said Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE CTO EMEA. “Our approach is to identify leading open source technologies and bring them together in a way that makes sense for our customers. Today that means bringing the unsurpassed productivity of the Cloud Foundry model together with modern Kubernetes infrastructure in SUSE Cloud Application Platform. This unique combination enables our customers to reduce complexity and become more agile to meet the changing demands of the digital economy.”

There are some serious incentives on offer for enterprises. We urge developers to sign up for a Developer Sandbox account and get free access to the platform. Or, if you are a platform administrator, you can access SUSE’s free (until September 15th) Accelerate Innovation offer to get SUSE’s complete container and application platform stack. That includes SUSE Cloud Application Platform, SUSE CaaS Platform (SUSE’s Kubernetes distribution) and SUSE Enterprise Storage, along with support, training and consulting services.

The new platforms and the trial access will definitely help accelerate implementation of agile, business-focused software. For additional information, learn how to deliver applications faster.

* Cloud Foundry Foundation Application Runtime User Survey, Oct 2018

The post Next-gen development with Cloud Application Platform from SUSE appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

How best to provide the frameworks and orchestration methods that these approaches require?

Many service providers, IT organizations, and development teams have the technical skills in-house to run application delivery solutions like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry at small scales — like proof-of-concept scenarios. But the challenge of building and maintaining production, enterprise-grade implementations of these complex platforms is out of reach for many.

Data governance and security are a leading concern to larger enterprises, so deploying microservices-based applications requires new types of ongoing IT oversight, vigilance, and control.

There is usually also a business need for multi-cloud or hybrid deployments of applications. Most companies now deploy across multiple clouds as a matter of course, and the transition to 100 percent cloud apps is a stepwise motion. It might not even be a goal! Therefore, multi-cloud management and a hybrid topology are additional complications for application delivery teams.

As organizations transition to modern application development and delivery strategies, many are turning to application delivery solution providers, like SUSE.

The company’s Application Delivery Solutions help enterprises modernize traditional applications, with the creation, development and deployment of new container-based applications and services. It also automates the full application delivery process and standardizes DevOps procedures — for containers and monolithic projects alike.

That means the entire application delivery approach can be transformed. It becomes more agile, cycle times and iteration periods shorten, and new application capabilities can be introduced into production faster, more efficiently, and at scale. Enterprises respond more quickly to opportunities, and — put simply — increase their business agility.

SUSE offers two platforms or solutions in this space: the SUSE Container as a Service (CAAS) Platform and SUSE Cloud Application Platform, which offer full lifecycle management for all container applications, boost DevOps‘s operational efficiency, and reduce the time taken for new offerings to come to market.

Here’s a little more detail on each:

SUSE Container as a Service Platform

The SUSE CaaS Platform gives companies a stable, self-updating (without service interruption), and unified environment in which to develop, deploy, and manage container-based applications.

Containers run on-premises, on hybrid cloud/data center resources or across multiple clouds. The full platform agnosticism allows a business to transform the way it wants, with whatever goal in mind: a cloud-first, cloud-always strategy, or the flexibility and security of a transitioning, hybrid foundation.

SUSE Cloud Application Platform

The SUSE Cloud Application Platform lets organizations deliver new hybrid, single- or multi-cloud capabilities and applications as quickly as needed. That creates a business-focus, yet for teams, manages deployment and development policies on a pod-to-pod basis, and with granular user deployment quotas.

SUSE Cloud Application Platform helps build cloud-first or hybrid-hosted applications and services with a Cloud Foundry Application Runtime in a Kubernetes-native architecture (SUSE is a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider). Companies get multi-cloud flexibility, with options to deploy to any combination of Amazon, Azure, or Google Cloud, for example.

DevOps processes can be better formalized and automated, driving operational efficiencies and better overall productivity for developers, deployment teams, and operations. Every deployment, at every stage in the development-to-production journey, is handled by the platform, regardless of the destination cloud(s).

Standard application delivery processes scale perfectly, and the lean platform gives complete control, using the technologies and methods with which your team will already be familiar.

Secure and self-healing, the SUSE Cloud Application Platform is the best way to deploy, manage, and scale your applications as you transition to a cloud-native application delivery approach.

In conclusion

SUSE Application Delivery solutions offer open, hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities and application delivery innovations that enable businesses to support their customers when, where and how they’re needed.

To get a pragmatic guide on how to get on the road to cloud-native application delivery, check out this whitepaper. Alternatively, get in touch with a representative from SUSE who speaks your language.

The post Exceed your customers’ expectations with new ways to deliver applications appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Virtualized machines provide amazing value for money compared to bare-metal servers, and they come with more efficient utilization of finite hardware resources. They also create possibilities around scalability and are rapidly imaged and duplicated. Backups, deployments and snapshot restores of entire environments are simple, quick, and make services more reliable.

Containers are the next logical virtualization step, with relatively few resources needed from each physical server, due at least in part to the minimal OS overhead taken by a container.

But other than the return on investment in terms of smaller resource footprints, why are containers proving so popular in business contexts?

Containers allow the creation of entire applications based on microservices. That’s a modular application build model that’s already aligned with agile development methods. Containers are portable and platform agnostic too, ensuring that containerized applications and services operate consistently in just about all environments.

Today’s container management frameworks such as Kubernetes allow the rapid release of new application code. That reflects the quick, business-driven changes necessary in today’s competitive environment. Development of new applications and services need not be held back by purely resource-focused concerns.

Containers are portable across development, test, and production environments, and have shorter cycle times, which fit better with agile DevOps processes. Efficient lifecycle automation provided by container management systems enable enterprises to deliver new capabilities faster.

Container management platforms such as Kubernetes support the easier introduction of new code, and an iterative, improvement-based development mindset. As organizations’ needs change, production deployments can be on-premises, in the cloud (public or private), and back, or can be spread in multi-cloud models (any combination of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and so forth).

All that said, there are significant challenges for an organization creating its own container management framework. Environments based on Kubernetes require significant investment in testing and maintaining complexity. The solution is SUSE Container as a Service (CaaS) Platform, an enterprise-ready platform that allows companies to get all of containerization’s benefits, without having to lose value from existing hardware investments, or redeploy precious staffing resources (people and training).

SUSE CaaS Platform runs on bare-metal in-house (on compatible hardware), or in public or private clouds, or indeed, any combination — just like containers themselves. The easy deployment of SUSE CaaS Platform means your Kubernetes environment will be up and running fast, so you can deploy modern applications on a highly resilient platform, using the very latest in DevOps practice.

SUSE CaaS Platform provides scalability that is secure and is built on industry-standard technologies already familiar to your developers and IT teams. At the core of SUSE’s containerization is Micro OS, a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server developed for containerized environments. It uses the same kernel as its big brother, so there’s no overhead in terms of another operating system to support, nor any need to have to reskill.

Production-ready Kubernetes provides the open-source standard for container deployment and management, and SUSE CaaS Platform is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certified Kubernetes distribution. The certification means that you can switch at will from one (certified) distro to another, and cloud and/or on-premise Kubernetes instances will integrate seamlessly.

Containers empower organizations with rapid delivery of applications that are infrastructure and platform agnostic. That means a business can react as quickly as it needs to changes in its commercial landscapes, without complicating resource needs.

SUSE offers a free 60-day trial of SUSE CaaS Platform 3.0, the next generation Kubernetes-based container management solution. Why not discover for yourself the power of Kubernetes? Alternatively, to learn more or speak to a representative about SUSE, SUSE CaaS Platform, and its other application development and delivery offerings, click here.

The post How to Simplify, Modernize and Accelerate with Scalable Containers and SUSE appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Technology touches every aspect of the enterprise, so IT and digital infrastructures have to reflect and second-guess the changes through which the business goes. Part of the issue is the cultural realignment that’s sometimes necessary: changing the technology won’t make things change. Technology supports the change made in everyday business processes.

Most organizations today have at least one core IT system that acts as the backbone of the whole enterprise.

For medium and larger businesses, ERP systems like SAP span multiple divisions and departments. SAP often powers collaboration and communication and acts as a single source of truth. From the central ERP, the business decision-makers can create change, and also monitor results, often in real-time.

When a large ERP provider like SAP announced its discontinuation of support for SAP Business Suite on Windows (and UNIX), this formed the catalyst on which many enterprises embarked on larger digital (and business) transformation exercises.

By moving to SAP S/4HANA on SUSE Enterprise Linux, companies are presented with an opportunity to adapt, refresh, and invigorate a significant part of their digital systems.

Is migrating SAP onto a Linux-based platform an overwhelming problem? Perhaps not. Linux is, as IT professionals know, running most applications and services already, especially those in the large public clouds. But nevertheless, the transformation over to a new platform, for such a business-critical system, might seem overwhelming or risky to businesses.

The great news is that there are several specialists that will not only help organizations transition their SAP solutions to a Linux-based cloud, but also help and advise if that change is made in-house. Furthermore, the provider of the fastest, most secure, and most optimized SAP solutions on Linux is, without doubt, SUSE. This is a company that always puts business first, and so can guide the entire process.

As something of an SAP specialist, and with long experience at an enterprise level of helping organizations with their IT strategies, the company offers overarching reinvigoration or reinvention of IT right across the enterprise.

So before you make the leap from SAP Business Suite to S/4HANA on Linux, there are a few thought processes to run through, according to the company. Regardless of your organization’s size, SUSE knows the central (and vital) role SAP plays in the way your business runs. Therefore, either with the company’s help or as part of your internal strategizing, you should consider:

Determine which is the best migration path for your business

Some organizations may take SAP’s actions as a signal to move everything into the cloud. SUSE can help decide whether this should be done wholesale (rarely), or more likely, in a stepwise, cautious manner, with extensive road-testing and sandboxing.

Determining that migration plan will be a core part of the digital transformation process – a journey that’s effectively continuous in today’s business environments.

Assessment of the skills already in-house, or required

Are the right training programs in place? Does your team possess the skills both to migrate SAP to Linux, and indeed, to fully support and implement any further digital changes, upgrades, reassessments happening at the same time? Is any outside help required, and if so, should that be on a part-time or fixed-term basis?

Realize the benefits of Linux and open source

Any return on investment of a digital transformation project should take into account the potential opportunities for optimization and efficiency offered by an open yet established platform like SUSE Enterprise Linux. Linux is both powerful and extensible, and by nature, completely personalize-able according to an enterprise’s individual requirements.

Its platform-agnostic nature is a plus-point, but not all Linux distributions are the same. SUSE has optimized its offerings for SAP and holds many benchmarks for the ERP – this is a market leader in its field.

Plan, perform risk analysis, test

Risk analysis, ahead of time, helps decision-makers avoid obvious mistakes. The team at SUSE have, to use the phrase “been there, done that.” With on-tap expertise and the technology to produce massively positive results, even for enterprises with no open-source experience, the planning phase can be a guided process.

Options, possibilities

The move to SAP S/4HANA opens up many new possibilities offered by the open-source Linux. But only SUSE also offers tight integration with SAP. There’s simply no need, in any case, to jump into the unknown alone.

With expertise across multiple platforms, in IoT, Edge, DevOps, systems, networks, and cloud, the SUSE team brings technology and business together.

If your business has SAP at its core, Tech Wire Asia recommends this supplier of SAP migration knowledge and enablement. Whether it’s a full IT transformation or the first steps into big data, you’ll need a technically-accomplished, but business-focused partner to drive the project.

If you recognize that an SAP redeployment onto Linux is the perfect opportunity to develop a fuller, more impactful digital realignment (if not a full transformation), get in touch with a representative local to you today.

The post Seize the opportunity to transform SAP and the enterprise, with SUSE appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Whether it’s making the leap to cloud-based hosting for SAP or continuing with in-house provisions, the choice of server platform is paramount. While Linux is seen as an agnostic platform (one distribution is largely similar to every other, being based on the same kernel), there are significant differences in the flavor of Linux chosen.

And as business-focused IT professionals know, the computing service provision space is highly competitive. Locating a reliable host and OS that will be optimized for S/4HANA is no simple task, given the choices currently on the market.

Furthermore, finding a provider with the agility and elasticity that’s required by modern business demands in SAP provision is no easy matter. Such a business-critical system, at the heart of many enterprises in the region, needs the capability to quickly scale, without any negative impact on users – and by proxy, affecting the end-users’ experience.

In this area, one company that has a significant degree of experience is SUSE, whose Enterprise Server has had SAP-specific features and extended capability for many years.

With a zero downtime, and agents like SAP HANA Topology and SAP HANA, the optimization tools of choice specific to SAP make the transition to the new Linux-only topology safer, but the end results much faster, too.

The platform, and the company behind it, come well recommended by companies from all over the globe that have made the change.

“In the past it took at least eight hours to run a report, whereas now we get them at the click of a button. This cuts time spent waiting for reports by around 99.99 percent — accelerating planning and decision-making. We have far more control over access levels since moving to the new platform, boosting security. We’ve also seen performance more than double, and we need only three people to maintain the SAP landscape, versus five for the legacy system.” Head of IT, Southern Petrochemical Industries Corporation (India). Read the full story here.

Any transformation project with a major or minor SAP component is much simpler when working with SUSE.

The company currently has no fewer than 111 SAP HANA benchmarks for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP and has become the go-to provider to offer support and guidance for large migration projects. Those transformative projects have often included the whole IT stack, providing structures that are wholly business-oriented rather than ones that come from a purely technical stance.

SUSE provides business-centric consultation and execution which powers full IT transformation exercises, allowing a safe and impactful transition. And at the end of the day, end-users, customers, and internal stakeholders each reap the benefit both of the SUSE Enterprise Linux power and of the support and guidance on tap during the migration.

Whether it’s the implementation of a software-defined infrastructure, providing faster access to resources, or helping to promote newer DevOps methodologies, SUSE helps deliver new and legacy applications on a better and more agile platform that’s SAP-centric.

Enterprises all over the world are turning to SUSE for its long-term support guarantees, and its reputation as the Linux platform that’s tuned to SAP, and to the business too.

SUSE offers solutions to help transform the data center or migrate to any cloud, and the company provides businesses with the agility, stability, and reduced costs that are fit for 2020 and beyond.

The specific skills on offer from SUSE cover all aspects of digital transformation projects, not least ones which have, at the forefront, the transition of SAP from Windows to Linux.

To learn more about SUSE’s offerings in enterprise Linux, SAP, and broad-reaching digital transformation project oversight, get in touch with a representative who speaks your language today.

The post Moving SAP can be the start of digital realignment with SUSE capability appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

While many service providers, IT organizations, and development teams have the technical skills needed to run freely available application delivery solutions like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry in small scale or proof-of-concept scenarios, the challenge of building and maintaining enterprise-ready implementations of these complex technology platforms is a step too far for most.

Furthermore, with data governance and security being a leading concern to the larger enterprise, deploying microservices-based applications at scale in production requires significant ongoing IT expertise, vigilance, and control.

There’s also the business need for multi-cloud or hybrid deployments of applications at any stage of development, and as most companies now deploy across multiple clouds as a matter of course, multi-cloud management is becoming an additional complication for application delivery teams.

Therefore as organizations transition to modern application development and delivery strategies and consider adopting continuous deployment methodologies for microservice-based applications, many are looking to application delivery solution providers, like SUSE.

The company’s Application Delivery Solutions help enterprises modernize traditional applications; create, develop and deploy new container-based applications and services; automate application delivery processes; and standardize DevOps procedures.

That means the entire application delivery approach can be transformed into a more agile system, shrinking cycle times so that new application capabilities can be introduced into production faster, more efficiently, and at scale. This enables enterprises to respond more quickly to problems and opportunities, and — put simply — to increase business agility.

With full lifecycle management for all container applications, SUSE’s Application Delivery Solutions duo of SUSE CaaS Platform and SUSE Cloud Application Platform boost DevOps’s operational efficiency and reduce time to market. Here’s a little more detail on each.

SUSE CaaS Platform

With SUSE CaaS Platform, companies get a stable, self-updating (without service interruption), cohesive, and unified environment in which to develop, deploy, and manage container-based applications.

With full platform agnosticism, containers can run on-premises or across multiple clouds. So, whether your business is transforming to reach a cloud-first, cloud-always strategy, or you want the flexibility and security of a transitioning, hybrid foundation, SUSE CaaS Platform will help you deploy and manage applications however suits your business strategy.

SUSE Cloud Application Platform

The SUSE Cloud Application Platform lets organizations deliver new hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities and applications as quickly as is required, enabling transformation of digital infrastructures in an agile, business-focused manner. It’s possible to manage granular user and organizational deployment quotas and boundaries, so you always remain in complete control.

SUSE Cloud Application Platform helps you build cloud-first or hybrid-hosted applications and services with a Cloud Foundry Application Runtime in a Kubernetes-native architecture — capability you might expect, of course, given SUSE’s status as a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. That creates multi-cloud flexibility, with options to deploy to Amazon, Azure, or Google Cloud.

DevOps processes are formalized and automated, driving operational efficiencies and better overall productivity, for developers, deployers, and ops teams alike. Every deployment at every stage in the dev-to-live process is handled by the platform, regardless of the cloud on which services are running.

Application delivery processes are standardized so they scale perfectly, and complete control is achieved with this lean platform that uses the technologies and methods with which your team will already be familiar.

Secure and self-healing, the SUSE Cloud Application Platform is the best way to deploy, manage, and scale your applications as you transition to a cloud-native application delivery approach.

In conclusion

With a reduced time to market and huge development efficiency gains, SUSE Application Delivery Solutions offer open, hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities and application delivery innovations that enable businesses to support their customers when, where and how it’s needed.

To get a pragmatic guide on how to get on the road to cloud-native application delivery, check out this whitepaper. Alternatively, get in touch with a representative from SUSE who speaks your language.

The post Choosing a containerization DevOps solution? Choose just one: SUSE appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.