So I have been playing around with suse studio. I was happy to get access while the product was still in beta. Nat and his team really created a great product. It’s an extremely well thought through web service which delivers a great user experience. Testing your build in your browser and overlay files are extremely helpful if you want to quickly get an appliance going. They did a great job at lowering the barrier of entry to cloud computing. Now it’s easy to create an image without knowing the tricky details of linux.

But…

there’s one thing that could make it explode in popularity.  Let’s start with the problem.
Creating an image for cloud computing often involves installing web servers, database servers, compiling packages (which is dead simple with suse studio) and maybe load balancing, image processing, video transcoding. And of course configuring the applications. All that stuff. Very time consuming and frustrating.
Lots of blogs show people how to create a killer configuration for a certain stack (like LAMP, LNMR etc), but they always describe the painful tasks you have to go through, just to have a working server. Often a couple of days later the first version numbers for linked tars change and the whole thing doesn’t work anymore. They outdate quickly. Big mess.

This is where suse studio comes into play

Suse studio is very good at allowing you to create your custom linux distribution. Now take it a step further and allow me to share these with people. Also I want to be able to further customize shared images in suse studio. Make customization a process that happens in the community. Similar to fork on github.

The appliance could become a social object. Sharable. Cloneable. Ready for further customization. Inheritance would be great too. That would be a service I’m totally willing to pay for. Amazon EC2 already showed how people pay for good appliance images – the end product.

Make linux appliance tutorials obsolete

Why are there 87,900 hits when I search for “rails server stack tutorial”? There should be  a public appliance directory by suse so it pops up when i google, er bing my desired stack. Then add ratings, comments and change notifications. It would save thousands of developers huge amounts of time. And suse/Novell could probably make a lot of money by becoming the mother of modern linux appliances.

Education can also benefit. The teacher could share the image with the students, they modify the image, upload it to AWS and have their own server running in the cloud. From nothing to your own customized linux server  in the cloud in 60 minutes.

I don’t know about the legal issues that come into play when sharing appliances. But just think about the benefits. From my standpoint they are huge.

This is just me thinking out loud, eager to hear what you think about my vision a social suse studio.

Please post your thoughts in the comments.