DEVOPSdigest

SUSE announced updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise and SUSE Rancher.

"Our commitment to open interoperability is based on our confidence that we can offer unique value in each of our products, and that we will continue to innovate more rapidly than our competitors in order to sustain our market leadership," said Melissa Di Donato, SUSE CEO. "Today's announcements demonstrate our commitment to innovation with game-changing enhancements to our SUSE Linux Enterprise and SUSE Rancher Kubernetes management technologies, new cloud-ready and cloud-native solutions for Edge and Hybrid IT environments, and a host of cutting-edge open source projects."

Enterprise Linux and Kubernetes management form the foundation of the modern IT stack and, as such, are the basis for SUSE's two product families, SUSE Linux Enterprise and SUSE Rancher.

Both product families exemplify SUSE's open, interoperable approach with significant enhancements, including:

- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Service Pack 3 (SLES 15 SP3) – SLES 15 SP3 will deliver full binary compatibility between openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise. For example, users will be able to seamlessly move workloads from development and UAT environments running Leap to production environments running SLES 15 SP3 and back again with assured application compatibility. As part of the announcement, SUSE plans to introduce programs and services to help users of CentOS, which no longer has binary compatibility with any commercial Linux distribution, migrate to Leap. SLES 15 SP3 introduces SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images (SLE BCI), which provide truly open, flexible and secure container images and application development tools for immediate use by developers and integrators without the lock-in imposed by alternative offerings. To match the needs of regulated markets, SUSE plans to provide specifically hardened and certified SLE BCI. SLES 15 SP3 includes updated support for the latest Intel, AMD, and IBM Z and POWER hardware platforms, ARM chipsets, enhanced database support and performance, and strengthened security and data protection with STIG compliance and crypto support.

- SUSE Rancher 2.6 – Already renowned for its ease of use, SUSE Rancher 2.6 will feature a new, clean, crisp user interface design that enhances the overall cluster management experience, whether managing one or one million clusters. Enhancing support for public cloud Kubernetes services, SUSE Rancher 2.6 will deliver full lifecycle management of Microsoft AKS and Google GKE, adding to existing support for Amazon EKS. Full lifecycle management enables customers to take advantage of the unique benefits of each public cloud's Kubernetes service while leveraging the consistent management, advanced features, and automation provided by SUSE Rancher. SUSE Rancher 2.6 also will introduce support for SLE BCI.

For organizations that want to leverage SUSE's entire portfolio, SUSE is introducing a family of open, interoperable solutions, specifically:

- SUSE Edge- An open, lightweight, software infrastructure for building, deploying and managing cloud-ready and cloud-native applications across all edges, SUSE Edge connects those edges to public and private clouds and data centers with automation, security and a common management framework. It features an ultra-reliable, lightweight Linux operating system, SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro, and industry defining lightweight Kubernetes distribution, K3s, both purpose-built for edge operating environments. It also includes SUSE Rancher for managing cloud-native containerized workloads and SUSE Manager for managing non-containerized cloud-ready application workloads.

- SUSE Hybrid IT - An open, interoperable solution consisting of SUSE Rancher, RKE, Longhorn, SUSE Manager, and SLES, SUSE Hybrid IT offers the complete software stack needed to run both traditional applications and cloud native applications in datacenter and cloud environments.

SUSE's open, interoperable solutions offer many advantages over deploying standalone Linux and Kubernetes while still allowing customers to connect products from other vendors and create a multi-vendor technology stack, with no fear of any artificial barriers of lock-in to SUSE.

SUSE also announced the beta release of Harvester, open source HCI software built on Kubernetes. Harvester delivers a new generation of HCI by managing both VMs and containers and by enabling cloud workload migration and hybrid cloud management for Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud. Today, traditional HCI is the de-facto standard for private cloud because it delivers virtualization, storage, and networking in one easy to consume package, and SUSE believes HCI is ripe for disruption by open source.