Reducing the Risk of Innovation  

Today’s DevOps teams must deploy software solutions faster than ever before and manage them more effectively. Time-to-Market and security are key-factors for DevOps-teams and orgnanizations. There are am lot of solutions available, a lot of knowledge and ideas exist inside DevOps-teams – but without the right adoption framework, things can quickly spiral out of control and cause a lot of risks and efforts!

As developers look to use the latest, greatest, and coolest tools – the Ops must keep things under control and streamline the complexity. Considering the boom of Kubernetes adoption, we have to realize that this also brings news challenges when it comes to wrangling cloud-native environments. For example, many large companies already struggle with ‘shadow IT’ in which corporate credit cards are used to spin up resources on the cloud. We can not even imagine how much money is being spent on container experiments on – for example – AWS where according to the Cloud Native Computing Federation – 51% of Kubernetes workloads are running.

This is why we at Cloudical understand a combination of a “Managed” Kubernetes service from a major hyper-scale cloud provider coupled with a platform like Cloud Foundry which has found great success amongst enterprise developers for its ability to implement ‘guard rails’ to be a great combination.

Below we’ll look at a solution we’re recommending to our customers to reduce the risk and the stress of innovating by combining SUSE’s Cloud Application Platform solution (CAP), which is a certified CloudFoundry distribution, with Amazon’s managed Kubernetes service, EKS.

An amazing and unique SUSE + AWS Solution 

At Kubecon Barcelona we got to catch up with both the AWS and SUSE teams and share our experience with the new solution they launched at SUSECON. To us, the SUSE Cloud Application Platform on AWS provides companies looking to innovate faster with a platform to standardize, accelerate, and simplify containerized application delivery. The new solution is a templatized deployment which can be quickly spun up on Amazon’s managed EKS offering.

The “Quick Start” is an automated deployment / infrastructure-as-code template tailored for AWS with the purpose of helping customers quickly see the value of SUSE’s unique Cloud Foundry platform.

For many existing Cloud Foundry users, the increasing availability of high value, container-based infrastructure, like Kubernetes, is an exciting development. However while Cloud Foundry has increasingly focused on managing application deployment with containers – the platform itself is known to be a resource intensive VM deployment that is complex to manage and hard to set up. For companies with cloud-native expertise like Cloudical, this management can be transparent to end-customers but the overhead is still there. This is what makes running SUSE’s Cloud Application Platform on Amazon EKS unique: Management efforts and technical overhead are minimized in a significant fashion.

Quick Start Architecture

The Amazon EKS Architecture Quick Start is a foundation to provide a fully managed, highly available, and certified Kubernetes-conformant control plane for SUSE Cloud Application Platform. We learned that AWS and SUSE worked closely on this implementation and were among the first ISVs to hammer away at the Amazon EKS Quick Start itself. You’ll notice the solution is spread across Availability Zones for resiliency, making it a production grade starting point.

With the Quick Start solution it’s also incredibly easy for Cloudical to demonstrate the value of an application modernization project or cloud-native application deployment, because the entire platform can be spun up in the time it takes for us to go grab a quick lunch! As you’ll see from the screenshots below, the Quick Start provides a wizard experience to guide you through set-up, making it even easier to get started.

What’s important is that the solution itself is completely customizable with the project available on Github and you’ll also see in Step 1 that you can use a custom CloudFormation template to account for unique requirements. We’ve also run into many questions while running through the simplified experience (because there’s definitely complexity behind it) so it’s helpful that it’s also accompanied by an entire Deployment Guide with detailed steps and information on the variables and their impact. The SUSE team reassures us that the deployment document is maintained by a joint team from we’ve been told that updates will be timely especially with major versions.

Deployment Screenshots:

Our customers are already benefitting from the platform’s ability to deploy containerized applications to EKS – and from Cloudicals side we are able to spend much more time with the customer on areas of innovation rather than platform management and operations thanks to the Amazon EKS service’s level of abstraction, ingrained security, on-demand upgrades and patching.

Cloudicals CTO and Head of Cloud Technology, Kim-Norman Sahm, emphasizes the advantages of this approach: “To us, SUSE Cloud Application Platform on EKS is an amazing way of leveraging the power of a sophisticated CloudFoundry distribution with the opportunities a public cloud environment such as AWS. Combining this with the technological excellence of SUSE and our cloud-technology expertise and consultancy approaches, makes for an awesome combination. Customers and teams can get started faster with a CloudFoundry-distribution, utilize all the advantages of AWS with EKS and can focus on delivering the best cloud solutions possible, while avoiding many of the common pitfalls of do-it-yourself approaches.”

Want to learn more? Get in touch with us here: https://test.cloudical.io.

More info: https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/suse-cloud-application-platform/

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