Former Rancher CEO on the Merger with SUSE

SUSE’s open source development and support will continue to serve as one of its main missions, following SUSE’s plans to extend its reach for customers’ Kubernetes deployments after its purchase of Rancher last year, says Sheng Liang, SUSE’s newly appointed president of engineering and innovation. Liang was formerly Rancher’s CEO.

“SUSE will continue to contribute to upstream Linux and Kubernetes development efforts,” Liang tells Container Journal. “SUSE will also create new open source projects in the cloud-native ecosystem to help drive the market forward.”

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As a leading Linux distributor and open source solutions provider, SUSE will largely rely on Rancher’s leading presence as a Kubernetes distributor – and one of the first developers of a Kubernetes management platform – to extend its offerings and services in Kubernetes environments. 

According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Rancher has about a 16% share in the Kubernetes market. Rancher is also the largest Kubernetes distributor that is not a cloud services provider; according to the CNCF data, Rancher market share only trails behind that of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. 

The share of the container management market also continues to expand rapidly. Citing Gartner data, SUSE says cloud-native applications and infrastructure adoption are expected to account for a 75% adoption rate of container and Kubernetes management solutions by 2024, compared to less than 35% in 2020.

With Rancher Kubernetes, Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) and Rancher Longhorn for persistent storage of stateless data for Kubernetes deployments, SUSE’s open source development work should also support Rancher’s edge computing applications, which have a high adoption rate, the company says. Chick-fil-A, for example, uses Rancher RKE to run on cube computers installed at restaurant sites. 

“Linux and Kubernetes combined enable DevOps engineers to deploy containerized applications on any infrastructure, from datacenter, cloud — to edge environments,” says Liang. “Linux and Kubernetes will enable enterprise IT to develop and deploy applications faster, and therefore enable their organizations to serve customers better.”

SUSE’s and Rancher’s business models have obviously been based on the development of open source and related services for Linux and Kubernetes, respectively. SUSE’s work should continue to involve engagement with the community at large. Such support might include, for example, developers contributing to commits for open source projects, regardless of whether SUSE offers specific commercial services for those projects or software. 

Liang describes the post-merger SUSE as a “leader in open source software” and a “leader in Linux and Kubernetes,” and says SUSE’s plans for open source innovation and participation will continue to involve “enabling enterprise customers to utilize open source technologies.” 

SUSE is also expected to play a role in stewardship of the open source community. Obviously, conflicts can exist, such as when a large number of collaborators shift their development for commits to forked projects, which Liang says is something to be avoided.

“Forking happens when open source community members disagree on the direction of a project. It indeed happens, but is relatively uncommon,” says Liang. “It is generally undesirable to fork a project, as forking hurts collaboration.”

SUSE also plans to infuse Kubernetes management capabilities into its software, Liang says. SUSE’s and Rancher’s respective offerings in Linux and Kubernetes, for example, are also designed to address DevOps teams’ need to manage what Liang describes as “two fundamental technologies in modern IT stacks.” 

“In some sense, Kubernetes is a natural extension of Linux,” says Liang. “While Linux supports applications running on a single server, Kubernetes orchestrates applications running on multiple servers.”

According to a recent survey of 1,250 IT professionals sponsored by SUSE competitor Red Hat, most companies represented in the survey think open source is necessary for digital transformations. Open source has also become “the preferred model of software innovation,” says Liang. 

“Open source has grown from base operating systems, languages and tools, to core application platforms like Kubernetes,” says Liang. “The influence of open source software will continue to grow in the computing infrastructure and computing platform space.”