SUSE Cloud Introduction

SUSE Cloud Introduction
SUSE Cloud is an open source software solution that provides the fundamental capabilities to deploy and manage a cloud infrastructure based on SUSE Linux Enterprise. SUSE Cloud is powered by OpenStack, the leading community-driven, open source cloud infrastructure project. It seamlessly manages and provisions workloads across a heterogeneous cloud environment in a secure, compliant, and fully-supported manner.The product tightly integrates with other SUSE technologies and with the SUSE maintenance and support infrastructure.

PiCloud infrastructure has been deployed based on SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 architecture and solution that can easily be deployed and managed. It offers a cloud management solution that helps organizations to centralize virtual machine deployment.

PiCloud provides the following features:

• Open source software that is based on the OpenStack Liberty release.
• Centralized resource tracking providing insight into activities and capacity of the cloud infrastructure for optimized automated deployment of services.
• A self-service portal enabling end users to configure and deploy services as necessary, also offering the ability to track resource consumption (Horizon).
• An image repository from which standardized, preconfigured virtual machines can be published (Glance).
• Automated installation processes via Crowbar using pre-defined scripts for configuring and deploying the Control Node(s) and Compute and Storage Nodes.
• Multi-tenant, role-based provisioning and access control for multiple departments and users within your organization.
• APIs enabling the integration of third-party software, such as identity management and billing solutions.
  Heterogeneous hypervisor support like KVM, VMware and Xen.

Software Defined Network (SDN)

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an architecture signifies to be dynamic, manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable, seeking to be suitable for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today’s applications. SDN architectures decouple network control and forwarding functions, enabling network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted from applications and network services.

The OpenFlow protocol can be used in SDN technologies. The SDN architecture is:

• Directly programmable
• Agile
• Centrally managed
• Programmatically configured
• Open standards-based and vendor-neutral