Rancher Labs headlined SUSE’s recent SUSECON Digital 2021 event, with the recently acquired company a big part of SUSE's updates to its edge, cloud, and cloud-native products.

One of its more significant moves was the launch of its SUSE Edge platform. It’s designed as a lightweight software package targeted at building and managing cloud-native applications running in edge locations.

It uses SUSE’s Linux Enterprise Micro operating system, the K3s Kubernetes distribution initially developed by SUSE’s Rancher Labs division, and a combination of SUSE and Rancher Labs components to manage cloud-native containerized workloads and non-containerized cloud-ready application workloads.

The package connects edge deployments to public and private clouds and data centers using automation, a common management framework, and embedded security.

“We really have something that cracks software distribution and then software lifecycle and operations for the edge in a way that's compatible with your data center and cloud deployments,” explained Markus Noga, VP of engineering at SUSE, in an interview with SDxCentral. He added that SUSE was moving in this direction prior to the Rancher Labs deal by bolstering its legacy products, but that the deeper cloud-native focus is in line with where customers are moving with their edge deployments.

As for that increasingly important security component, Noga stressed that SUSE takes a “defense-in-depth” and “multiple layers” approach. He noted this includes hardware that can’t “easily be opened,” but that if it is, then “you want an operating system that has a tamper-proof build,” and also a secure boot so that “you are sure that people are not inserting things into your boot chain.”

“Those are layers that you need to couple with things like [Security-Enhanced Linux] profiles for application hardening and keeping people in their application jail boxes so that one errant app cannot easily break out with container security on top of that,” Noga said. “And then with everything related to secure lifecycle management layered on top of that and that chain becomes stronger and stronger. This is really how we see security. There's no single element that solves the problem for everything. You have to be secure everywhere because, remember, the defender has to get it right every time, the attacker only has to get it right once to succeed.”

SUSE also released its Hybrid IT platform stack that uses the Rancher Labs Kubernetes Engine (RKE) and Longhorn cloud-native container storage service with the SUSE Manager and updated SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) distribution to run traditional applications and cloud-native applications in data center and cloud environments.

It also released a beta version of the Rancher Labs’ developed Harvester open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software stack that is built using Kubernetes. The HCI stack installs on bare metal server clusters and provides integrated virtualization and distributed storage capabilities for both virtual machines (VMs) and containers in the same package.

That platform was initially announced late last year just after SUSE closed on the Rancher Labs acquisition, and provides an open source alternative to commercial HCI software like VMware vSphere and Nutanix.

SUSE announced the Rancher Labs acquisition last summer. Published reports indicated the deal was valued for in excess of $600 million. The deal bolstered SUSE’s cloud-native credentials and more specifically its position in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

“This acquisition enhances our ability to offer a more comprehensive portfolio, greater customer choice and no vendor lock-in,” explained SUSE CEO Melissa Di Donato at the time. “It will also enable us to play an even more strategic role with cloud service providers, independent hardware vendors, systems integrators, and value-added resellers who are eager to provide greater customer experiences.”

Rancher Labs’ Kubernetes experience also came from a position of strength. Forrester Research last year ranked the vendor’s multi-cloud container development platform alongside offerings from Red Hat and Google as the best in the space. Reference customers highlighted the vendor’s “comprehensive application catalog coverage, broad public cloud infrastructure integrations, strong participation in the cloud-native open source community, excellent customer support, rock-solid stability, and fast time-to-value.”