SUSE is a company that has been taking some impressive strides these last few months including helping fight COVID-19 in a variety of ways, a complete rebranding and modernization of the company assets and marketing fundamentals, as well as the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 SP 2. However, one piece of recent news from SUSE may have a much larger impact on the focus of the enterprise open-source company going forward. That news? Well, the acquisition of Kubernetes cluster experts, Rancher Labs. From the official Rancher documentation:
“Rancher is an open source software platform that enables organizations to run containers in production. With Rancher, organizations no longer have to build a container services platform from scratch using a distinct set of open source technologies. Rancher supplies the entire software stack needed to manage containers in production.“
Basically, Rancher is an extremely powerful tool to empower information technology teams to build large Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos, or Rancher’s own “Cattle” clusters that can easily scale as needed. In the past few years, the open source Kubernetes project from Google has risen to become the de facto container orchestration platform in the technology area and has become one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world.
Containers are becoming one of the most important concepts in software systems today and are used extensively for anything from small-scale web development to scientific computing on the largest supercomputers in the world; you can find containers–with Docker being the most popular today–literally everywhere in the world.
With competitors like Red Hat and Canonical investing quite a bit in improving container technology, this acquisition by SUSE may allow the company to investigate, implement, and support these technologies even further. It will definitely be interesting to see how Rancher is integrated into the SUSE stack and I wish both companies the best on their merger.
If you would like to read the official announcement from Rancher Labs, you can find it here. In addition, if you would like to learn more about exactly what capabilities Rancher provides, an official explanation video is linked below:
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