Using SUSE Appliance Toolkit to construct cloud application

Novell recently announced significant progress in its SuSE (R) Appliance Toolkit, which includes the award-winning SuSE Studio (TM) and a comprehensive suite of tools to make Linux applications portable and cloud-applied. At the same time, this latest version of the toolkit supports the creation of Amazon EC2 images with new virtual formats and advanced data center capabilities. As a result, independent software vendors (ISVs) and businesses can build optimized application images within minutes of private and public clouds.

SUSE Appliance Toolkit is a Workloadiq (TM) product, a complex of tools that helps independent software vendors (ISVs) and enterprise IT departments reduce the complexity, maintenance, and support costs of deploying software across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Through SUSE Appliance Toolkit's software Device Building guide and integrated "test-driven" features, the iterative testing process becomes faster, enabling ISVs and businesses to accelerate the delivery of applications.

"As the industry's first open source video stack, our customers use our technology to enhance site performance through video and multimedia interactive capabilities." "said Ron Yekutiel, chairman and CEO of Kaltura Company. "With SuSE studio and SuSE appliance Toolkit, by creating virtual appliances, we can quickly expand value-added services to provide our customers with integrated video capabilities tailored to their physical, virtual, and cloud computing facilities." ”

SUSE Appliance Toolkit 1.1 new additions

By adding features, Novell has enhanced many of the tools in SUSE Appliance Toolkit-SUSE Studio Onsite, Web YaST, SUSE Lifecycle, Management Server, and support for Kiwi. These features include:

 Build Amazon EC2 image-August 2010 announces that Amazon Web Services will soon provide hourly-priced SuSE Linux Enterprise server on-demand as part of the SuSE Cloud Program Cloud Project; now, using SuSE Appliance TOOLKIT,ISV and businesses can also build an application image based on SuSE Linux Enterprise for Amazon EC2.

 Support for KVM and OVF virtual machine formats-broadens the width of virtual environments, ISVs and enterprises can quickly encapsulate their applications, making them more flexible and more portable to OVF.

 Supports SuSE Linux Enterprise Server SP1-The industry's broadest virtualization capabilities, performance, reliability, and security, as well as more flexible maintenance and support options, This allows businesses to reduce costs and risks by using ISVs ' software devices or building their own cloud application images.

 Advanced Enterprise Capabilities – expands the scope of supported applications and usage. The new enhancements include the network boot via PXE, the use of LVM to assemble large physical disks into logical disks, and the import of existing Kiwi and autoyast scripts. ISVs can also leverage these features to meet the needs of large data center customers.

"Cloud computing has the potential to be agile and fast to market, but companies often lack the right tools to deploy their applications to cloud environments quickly and efficiently." "Novell Senior vice president and open Platform Solutions general manager Markus Rex said. "Software devices (preconfigured operating systems, middleware, and application synthesis) provide an ideal solution. With SuSE appliance Toolkit, enterprise and technology providers can create, test, and enhance applications for cloud facilities in just a few minutes. ”