SuSE tightens bolts on container management portfolio
Whether you prefer to say Suse, SUSE or SuSE, the team at Gesellschaft für Software und Systementwicklung (Ed: surely that should GfSuS?) know a thing or two about open source enterprise software, operating systems and infrastructure technologies, developer needs and modern application structures.
The company used its appearance at Kubecon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 held in Paris this week to detail enhancements across its cloud-native and Edge portfolio to enable users to securely deploy and manage business-critical workloads.
Let’s remind ourselves, SuSE (Ed: oh, so you picked the lower-case u version) is the company behind SUSE Linux Enterprise (the operating system, obviously), Rancher Prime (the commercial iteration of the open source Kubernetes management platform built for enterprise-grade environments) and NeuVector Prime (the commercial iteration of the open source Kubernetes container security platform) today.
Down on the ranch
New capabilities in Rancher Prime 3.0 and SUSE Edge 3.0 commit to enabling choice and providing secure platforms through 100 percent open source solutions.
“At SUSE, our commercial and open source users are equally important,” said Peter Smails, general manager of the SUSE enterprise container management business unit. “As such, our mission is two-fold; we need to deliver the capabilities our enterprise customers require in order to deploy and manage their business-critical production workloads, while also continuing to invest in innovation to support and grow our huge community of open source users. Today’s announcement speaks to both.”
New capabilities in Rancher Prime 3.0 help platform engineering teams deliver self-service Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to their developer communities and enhanced support for AI workloads.
New Rancher Prime 3.0 enhancements include:
- Enhanced secure software supply chain with SLSA certification and software bill-of-materials (SBOM) provides the trusted delivery enterprises need.
- Updated software lifecycle management delivers consistent, repeatable releases closely aligned with upstream Kubernetes lifecycle
- General availability of Cluster API and new Cluster Classes enables platform engineering teams to deliver self-service PaaS, allowing them to scale with automation and accelerate code-to-production.
- General availability of the Rancher Prime Application Collection delivers open source applications through a single, trusted, enterprise-grade distribution platform.
- Certified Kubernetes distributions RKE2 and K3s have been enhanced to automatically detect/configure the use of NVIDIA’s container runtimes simplifying the deployment of AI/ML workloads.
SUSE is also introducing Rancher Enterprise, a single package and price for the entire portfolio of Rancher Prime including multi-cluster management, OS management, VM management, persistent storage and SUSE’s certified Linux OS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro.
Open source investment
SUSE continues to invest in open source innovation across its entire cloud-native portfolio to support its large community of users.
Key enhancements include:
- Harvester 1.3.0: GPU cards support creation of virtual GPUs (vGPUs) allowing users to assign a vGPU to one or more VMs created by Harvester and Arm support in technical preview is now available.
- Longhorn 1.6.0: The latest update to the Data Engine Version 2.0 technical preview enables seamless performance volume backup and restoration of operations between version one and two data engines.
- RKE2 and K3s: NVIDIA GPU support and full Arm support have reached general availability.
- NeuVector Prime 5.3.0: New features include egress network connection visibility and GitOps automation and expanded support for arm64 architectures.
“Edge is the next frontier of innovation, but many organisations face challenges – knowledge of how to deploy at this scale to resource constraints to technical debt – in accelerating transformation at the edge,” said Keith Basil, general manager of SUSE Edge business unit. “Edge is essentially about pushing business value and compute power to where the customers and the data are, where it does the best good. SUSE Edge 3.0 is what teams need to deploy edge securely, confidently and at scale, ultimately helping them grow and sustain their competitive advantage.”
Purpose-built for the edge on SUSE’s 100 percent open source foundation, SUSE Edge 3.0 offers:
- Fully integrated, cloud-native edge platform: Increase efficiency across your edge infrastructure.
- Enterprise-grade security: Full platform, data center-grade security to every edge device, wherever it is located.
- Scalability: Easily deploy and manage edge infrastructure, from hundreds to tens of thousands of nodes.
