openSUSE Leap 16.0 is now available on Google Cloud Platform

openSUSE Leap 16.0 is now available as a public image on Google Cloud Platform. Both x86_64 and Arm64 images were built on 16 February 2026 and are ready for use with Compute Engine instances.

Launching an instance with openSUSE Leap 16.0

Getting started with Leap 16.0 on GCP is straightforward. From the Google Cloud Console, navigate to Compute Engine > VM instances and click Create Instance.

In the instance configuration page, scroll down to the OS and storage section and click Change to open the boot disk configuration panel.

Under the Public images tab, select openSUSE from the Operating system dropdown. You will then see openSUSE Leap listed under the Version dropdown — select the openSUSE Leap 16.0 entry. Choose your preferred boot disk type and size, then click Select to confirm.

From there, configure the rest of your instance settings — machine type, networking, firewall rules — as you normally would, and click Create to launch your new Leap 16.0 VM.

Google Cloud Observability

During instance creation, you will notice the Observability - Ops Agent section near the bottom of the configuration page. For supported operating systems, this provides a convenient Install Ops Agent for Monitoring and Logging checkbox that automatically installs the agent when the VM boots. However, with openSUSE Leap 16.0 selected as the boot disk image, this checkbox is greyed out and displays the message: "Not available for the selected image." This is because the automated installation method does not yet support Leap 16.0 (support available for Leap 15 only).

That said, the Ops Agent can still be installed manually via the command line once your instance is running. SSH into your Leap 16.0 VM and run:

curl -sSO https://dl.google.com/cloudagents/add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh
sudo bash add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh --also-install

This will add the Ops Agent repository and install the agent on your instance, giving you the same Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging integration you would get from the checkbox method.

For more details on manual installation, see the Ops Agent installation documentation.

As always, the openSUSE community welcomes feedback and bug reports — if you run into any issues with the GCP images, report them through the openSUSE Bugzilla.