SUSE Studio 1.3 aims for the cloud

With the release of SUSE Studio 1.3, SUSE has refocused its web application for building and testing virtual machine images on building images for OpenStack-based clouds, including the company's own SUSE Cloud distribution of OpenStack. The new version also adds support for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor and includes native KVM support – previous versions of SUSE Studio only supported KVM through VMware's VMDK format.

Like earlier versions, SUSE Studio 1.3 can also create images for Amazon's EC2 service. Users can link their AWS credentials within the web interface, which enables them to publish virtual appliances to Amazon's service directly from SUSE Studio. Similarly, the software is tightly integrated with OpenStack and SUSE Cloud. Images built with SUSE Studio will be immediately imported to a user's SUSE Cloud instance. Technical details of the feature, which SUSE calls WebHooks, are available on the SUSE Studio blog.

SUSE Studio 1.3 also provides a simple way to deliver patches to images that have already been deployed. Administrators can add a management agent for a SUSE Lifecycle Management Server to their images before building them, allowing images built in this way to automatically synchronise with the server without the need for any further configuration.

SUSE Studio 1.3 is the first update to the web application since the launch of version 1.2 in July 2011. The software is available as a web service and for local installation.

(fab)