Yesterday, we announced that it-novum (as the main sponsor of openATTIC) and SUSE have agreed to collaborate on the development of openATTIC (see the press release for more details).

SUSE has a long history and a notable reputation as a key contributor to Linux and open source software in general. We feel honored and proud that they approached us about this opportunity.

Our cooperation has two main objectives, that I would like to explain in some more detail below.

On the one hand, SUSE will collaborate with the openATTIC development team, to accelerate the implementation of openATTIC's Ceph management capabilities.

We realized that we're sharing a similar goal here: making Ceph ready for broader adoption, by lowering the barriers for managing it. Adding support for managing Ceph is something we had on our roadmap already, and the latest builds of openATTIC already include some Ceph functionality.

One of the things that we observed was that there currently is no comprehensive Ceph management GUI available, the configuration and administration usually needs to be performed from the command line. openATTIC with Ceph bridges the gap between traditional storage solutions and this new storage paradigm, as they support storage for legacy applications as well as for modern architectures.

SUSE's expertise and resources in this area will help us to make much faster progress on this goal. Furthermore, SUSE intends to include openATTIC as the management interface in a future release of their Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage solution, to simplify the management experience.

Secondly, we are working on making openATTIC available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and openSUSE Leap in the form of installable packages. This will give SUSE users an easy way to install and use our storage management solution. Engineers from SUSE will assist us in making the required changes to port openATTIC to the SUSE distribution.

Adding SUSE Linux to the list of platforms that openATTIC runs on has several benefits, both for our users, and the project itself. One the one hand, it gives users more choice: they can use the Linux distribution they prefer or have standardized on for deploying openATTIC in their environment. openATTIC (the project) will benefit from the expanded user base and ecosystem, which will help us to extend our reach and gain new users (and hopefully new contributors).

The collaboration and development activities between openATTIC and SUSE will take place in the open - SUSE will contribute to the upstream openATTIC project using the established contribution processes and communication channels. openATTIC for SUSE Linux distributions will be available from the openSUSE Build Service (OBS), a public service that provides a vast repository of free software, not only for SUSE Linux distributions.

Sticking to the "release early, release often" mantra, any new Ceph management functionality will be made available as soon as it's ready. We will continue to publish new releases of openATTIC every 4-5 weeks, with nightly builds in between these releases.

For us, this cooperation with SUSE is a major milestone in the history of openATTIC. We look forward to this collaboration and we welcome SUSE to the openATTIC community!

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