SUSE launches CaaS platformSUSE has launched SUSE CaaS (Container as a Service) Platform, a development and hosting platform for container-based applications and services. The solution is a valuable new piece of SUSE’s growing software-defined infrastructure portfolio, which integrates open source technology to drive next-generation innovations that matter to customers. SUSE CaaS Platform lets IT operations and developers provision, manage and scale container-based applications and services to meet business goals faster.Organisations looking to improve business agility are adopting a software-defined infrastructure approach to support containerisation of their applications. Most are either containerising existing applications directly or using a modern microservices architecture approach. SUSE CaaS Platform supports both tactics, helping customers be more agile and reduce operating costs.”Container innovation is improving how applications are developed and run, but companies don’t want to have to set up and maintain a complex and secure container infrastructure by themselves,” says Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE chief technology officer. “They want to focus on creating applications that bring value to their business. So SUSE is providing an easy-to-use container infrastructure solution that helps them deploy next-generation, cloud native container-based applications and progressively migrate traditional and existing apps.”SUSE CaaS Platform consists of three key components – orchestration using Kubernetes, a purpose-built operating system (SUSE MicroOS) for microservices and containers, and configuration capabilities – that provide the following benefits to customers and partners:• Reduced time to market using out-of-the-box platform capabilities that enable customers to implement orchestration using production grade Kubernetes, deploy resilient container services, maximise portability, and develop in a trusted computing environment.• Increased operational efficiency with automation of deployment management tasks and full application lifecycle support of containers using the built-in container toolset. It provides capabilities to manage on-premise registry, build container images, securely patch container images, collaborate securely and use trusted images from the SUSE Registry.• Enablement of DevOps for improved application lifecycle management. It bridges developers and operations using a single, unified container platform that helps save development and operations time. It also makes it easy to deploy microservices and enables coexistence of configuration and code.”SUSE envisions several key use cases for its CaaS platform, including the enablement of DevOps and microservices implementations for faster and more automated application releases across different infrastructure,” says Jay Lyman, principal analyst: cloud management and containers, for 451 Research. “Organisations interested in enterprise-grade security, reliability and scalability with containers are the ones most likely to be interested in the SUSE CaaS Platform.”Craig Parker, head of integrated systems business at Fujitsu in EMEIA, says: “As we endeavor to equip our customers with the latest in container innovations, SUSE’s Container as a Service Platform provides us with a strategic choice to adopt a modern container infrastructure solution while saving costs in building and maintaining a proprietary set of container tools. In addition, the integrated SUSE MicroOS and Kubernetes gives us a good option to run container-based applications on Fujitsu hardware and keep them up to date with minimal manual intervention.”