 Hello, this is your host Swapnam Prathya and welcome to TFIR. Today, we are going to talk about Suzy. As you all know, Suzy is the oldest Linux company. The company was started just a few months after Linux Store Wells released the Linux kernel. Suzy has evolved beyond just the Linux winter and is expanding into other areas including cloud and edge computing, but Operating system which is Sli or Suzy Linux Enterprise remains their core strength But we all know that The IT Linux game is changing and more and more workloads are getting Continuized. So what is Suzy's strategy for the operating system? How is the operating system itself is evolving? So today we are going to talk to one of my favorite Technologists in Suzy or in the whole open source word Mattias Ackerman So Mattias welcome to the show and before we kind of deep dive into this interview Can you quickly introduce yourself? My name is Mattias Ackerman. I'm director of product management for Linux at Suzy. I'm over 18 years with the company and Besides doing that the job as a team lead I'm also very interested in in file systems and security. So that's my my pet interests basically So let's quickly start with With slas or the operating system market as we see that the whole market is kind of moving towards modernized workload, which is mostly containers Suzy has cubic and which is like community version of CASP platform and then of course you have slas so do you see evolution of slas in the In the in the direction where it serves it because more and more kind of continue right itself So I think we have to differentiate the market. That's the first step It's it's not so much that That we that we see Everybody doing the same thing, but we see Customers from their use case perspective and also from their deployment perspective differentiating the the deployment scenarios and this is why from from Suzy's perspective and Even more from a partner and customer perspective. It makes sense that we allow our customers to Deploy the enterprise Operating system platform that we are building to deploy in different methods. So This means that yes on the one side we see customers who want to use more containers Containers based on an enterprise operating system the containers themselves or the container host platform That would be Suzy CASP platform On the other side, we also see that customers who are using a traditional operating system how I would like to call Susan's enterprise server that they are wanting to try Containers they want to to try have a first step into it without getting rid of their traditional methods and then so that's the middle ground and then we see very traditional customers and we also see a trend there Who go for even longer life cycles? So that's what I would call true mission critical or business critical applications and deployments and and those are the customers and partners who Stick with the traditional deployment method the longest so my perspective is yes We see a trend towards more containerization But I would differentiate not everybody is going there But Suzy is well prepared with the what we call common code base of Susan and center price to build a Traditional operating system to make the traditional operating system be enabled for more containerization and On a third also to build other Deployment methods out of this like a container as a service platform So that's the host but also and we already started this to build containers instead of Traditional workload deployments out of the Susan and center price Platform so an example is that on the container as a service platform that Susan delivers today We already have I think six containers Which are built out of the same code as Susan's enterprise server is and there for example is a container with the Maria to be database so the opensource database and This one is directly derived from the from the code that is in Susan's enterprise server So it's basically the same the same source code It's even the same binary that we just package as a package up as a container Does that answer your question? Oh, yeah, it does No, let's let's just bring that containers to the operating system itself I'm assuming that Suze is working on the next version of Slash, you know, and you're skipping 13 and 14 for superstitious reason or whatever they are and moving to 15 Which may be released next year or whenever it's coming So can you can you talk about the roadmap and how it's kind of changing or you know evolving? Kind of boring the idea of you know the same modular Containerizer, you know broken pieces kind of model. Yeah, so indeed We have our roadmap and it's it's public Also was announced last year Suze con that we are planning Susan's enterprise 15 mid next year So that's the rough target and this follows a trend in the market that we see that every four years It is necessary for the code base to be refreshed just because the open source development is so quick there are changes in the security packages that we need to To deploy and and and other things that make it necessary So from that perspective mid next year it is and Susan's enterprise 15 as we call it Is the first Operating system platform that we as Suze deliver Which has the unique functionality of being delivered as just one installer and this is in the context of Modularization that we have started with Susan's enterprise 12 already So let me explain this a little bit with Susan's enterprise 10 and 11 We had a rather monolithic operating system This is what everybody does and did and that was good up to a certain point in time Then up at this point in time. We saw that more and more people Followed the agile approach on Development so software development and software deployment Agile approach approach not only from the development and process perspective But also it has influences and consequences for the tools that you're using for the code base that you're using it must refresh itself much quicker than it did before and So this means that also from the operating system perspective and from the development platform that we're offering perspective We have to give our customers and partners a valid Set of tools and packages and we also have to see how we can combine The requirement for the operating system to be very stable long-term mission critical on the one side to also Give the agile part of the world as I would like to say it what they need to develop and From my perspective Containerization is only the logical consequence of doing agile development because with agile development You give back the power very strongly to the developers and now that you give it back to developers The ops part of it DevOps is that right? They don't want to bother any more about the deployment and the dependencies so the Packaging is given back to the developer and this is what we call content containerization So containerization agile and DevOps together make perfect sense and the operating system platform 12 was already a little bit prepared in 15 we go a next step by Doing more modularization But also in the same time by doing more We make it more easy for customers and partners to consume this because what we figured it That's not always easy to to see where packages are how they depend and from a SUSE perspective This is where we really invest to make in our update stack in our software stack this easy for customers to use That's important Because obviously people don't want to be bothered by the operating system and their tools They would just want to use in the same sense of doing things more easy What we do is Allowing customers to all to install all susan links enterprise products out of one installer We call it unified installer and this unified installer will just grab all the dependencies that it needs Either from the internet or a local installation source that you can as a customer or partner deploy and from this one it will install the Required and requested product for you so modularization on the one side and unified installer go hand in hand and The interesting thing now is that the code base. So I often say common code base of this traditional susan is enterprise also will be reused to build the software stack which then builds the next container as a service platform which We think will be called container as a service platform 3 so it will be come out around the same time as susan center press 15 and It will be based on the very same binary packages so that also hardware certifications and Potentially also security certifications can be shared between those two product lines as much as this is possible from a perspective of these respective certifications and in this way the modularization of 15 and the unified installer also have a consequence for us to be more Capable of delivering a containerized platform because the containers that you then built from this Common code base can either be deployed directly on susan's enterprise Server 15 where you will have a container engine or they can run on Susa containers service platform Where we also have a container engine which then is managed by by Kubernetes But a I think that would go a little bit out of the scope of our discussion today if I recall correctly recently when Leap was announced the whole chemistry between open Susa leave tumbleweed factory and you know house less was taking packages. So What will be the kind of you know? Relationship between cubic cast tumbleweed and slas 15 where will the code base be coming how the yeah so the interesting aspect is that we have a give-and-get between Multiple partners in this in this whole discussion. So we are on the one side have the Let's say upstream open source community. So this is the hundreds of communities outside Then we have what we call Open Susa tumbleweed where the open Susa community takes the most recent code Shapes it up to run on a Susa platform to be built in the open build service that you are well aware of and And then create a let's say rolling distribution out of it. And then we have Factory which is a little bit more a stable stable thing and with that it is also a good preparation to be used as a As as a base for for the next Susanino Xander price I Think you might talk to the open Susa guys It's I think tumbleweed and factory are meanwhile much closer together than I just described it Now Susa comes in and and Susa Susan's enterprise comes in what we do is that our developers who are doing who are working on Susanino Xander price 15 Are not only are not directly contributing to an internal code base of 15 But they contribute to factory and then and they contributed already in the past and on a specific point in time there is a so-called a Cut from from this code base or a freeze and then this means that then we have a real 15 code base and at a very Near close to point in time to that as well Also, the open Susa people start building a leap 15 beta out of that There is a little bit of time gap because there is a lot of work Susan internally going on To to qualify the platform to harden it and this is something that we don't want the The community to bother with so we do that in part of Susanino Xander price. That's Susa's contribution to the Open-source world, right? It's part of it open build services there But also our hardening of all this and and then the community can can take this However, you should not see that as a one-way because we have taken Factory before so there is also an influence from the community towards Susa It's not it's not that only Susa defines what's what's going on there But it's really back and forth and the same is true for for cubic which is the Open-source version of what we call Susa container as a service platform as a product so cubic is Basically, we have done these container as a service platform very quickly in Susa internally out of the code that everybody knew And we have given back the recipe for how to do that In the open-build service also to the community so that not only the way of how to build a distribution a Linux distribution we have communicated and documented for the community, but also the way how to build a Susa micro os and then on top of this the container as a service platform has been documented and given to the Community so that everybody can see how we do that internally and and what's the base for for our product The the actual difference between between these two is is not so big. It's just that we have a Let's say a special approval process internally How how we do that with the product because certifications and compliance depend on it supportability by the micro focus customer care and Susa customer care organization depend on it so this is what how we do the product but the recipes and the code base and also the Philosophical background how to build packages how to build a distribution which security measures to apply all this is consistent across those two families or Yeah, I don't know if it makes sense in this discussion or not, but Cubic word or password versus less word, you know the ad delivery Mechanism is also different. So so do you foresee that you know that containers will kind of become, you know The kind of default apps instead of the traditional model What are the benefits or what are the drawbacks that? so I Think that there is a trend towards Contrary realization, but what I see from a probably too much European perspective. I don't know is that we have a Different approaches and also different speeds towards containers in the world so we have areas in Europe where I have been where 100 from hundred people one or two had heard of or tried containers While I think in in other parts of Europe and also the US Containerization is is quite the other way around you would in hundred people only have two people who have not touched it Or even use it in production Right. So so this is one thing we have a worldwide different approach to containers as I said containerization is very close to the development To the agile development and the DevOps approach so for people who have a traditional Software development. This probably does not perfectly fit and there is one Mmm Caviar that I have it's not it's not that it is bad to have containers, but there is one caveat the real challenge for containers is The the long-term maintenance of it as long as you are developing Your own software as you as long as you have in-house developers who built these containers all is fine You have the machinery in in-house to deploy to build Deploy maintain update and so on but once we are talking about sharing containers between different parties and this is actually Where SUSE is in and what SUSE is is already doing then new measures are important So one of these measures for example is security You need to have signed containers many containers out there in the world are not signed So this is one of the things we really need to have and the other thing is Also again in the security and maintenance area that you need a lifecycle process and a lifecycle management for containers So that you really can make sure that one ever a container runs or is started We have to say better whenever a container is started You really have the most recent version of the container But not only of the specific software that you are looking at But the whole stack which was used to build this container must be up to date with respect to stability and security measures And this is the real challenge that I foresee and this is why SUSE's approach of having a containers as a service platform as the host operating system Together or in combination with tools like SUSE manager where you can monitor or also Introspect the containers themselves is a need and also for customers important to to have to them have the same Stability the same security and the same compliance in a containerized world that they used to have in a Classical or traditional operating system infrastructure I think I got everything within the time frame that I had is there anything else that you think I think I covered the base No, I think I think you had some very very good questions To this topic. So, thanks for that