At KubeCon North America today, SUSE announced several updates to its container and edge computing platforms. The new offerings aim to help customers manage and secure diverse cloud-native environments.

SUSE got its start as a Linux distribution vendor and, like its rival Red Hat, expanded into the cloud-native world several years back. Like Red Hat's OpenShift, SUSE's Rancher cloud-native platform is based on the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system. SUSE acquired Rancher Labs back in 2020 and has been steadily improving the technology over the last several years.

At Kubecon, SUSE announced a new version of its upstream open-source Rancher project as well as a new release of the enterprise edition known as Rancher Prime. Alongside the Rancher updates, SUSE also issued the latest iteration of its SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro Linux distribution designed for containers and virtualization.

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The new Rancher 2.8 release integrates support for the Kubernetes 1.27 platform that was first announced in April. The actual most recent release of Kubernetes is version 1.28, which was released in August.

Peter Smails, GM for enterprise container management at SUSE, told SDxCentral that the new open-source Rancher 2.8 release includes a self-service public API. Smails said users have wanted the new API in order to directly create custom resource definitions and automate processes within Rancher more easily.

As part of the Rancher 2.8 release, the included Fleet continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tool benefits from improved drift detection and reconciliation capabilities. Smails noted that this helps with security and ensuring clusters remain compliant at scale.

Rancher Prime is SUSE's enterprise subscription offering and Smails said the focus is on providing a very turnkey, seamless experience to organizations. One way it is enhancing the experience is by more deeply integrating its own portfolio products as well as third-party tools.

Among the integrations in Rancher Prime 2.0 is SUSE's NeuVector cloud-native security technology. SUSE acquired NeuVector in 2021 and pledged at the time that it would be bringing the security technology closer together with Rancher.

"It has been a long time coming for us to basically create a direct integration between Rancher and NeuVector and we've officially checked that box now," Smails said. “We're giving organizations the ability to access and run the NeuVector container security capabilities directly within the Rancher user interface.”

On the cluster management front, Rancher Prime 2.0 now supports the Cluster API (CAPI) standard.

"CAPI has come along and now it's an industry standard for the basic provisioning of clusters," Smails said. "We're using that now as our vehicle for doing our cluster provisioning."

SUSE is also making it easier for enterprises to get applications up and running on Rancher with the Rancher Prime Application Collection. Smails said that the collection is a tech preview offering that provides a curated library of applications that enterprises can deploy from within Rancher Prime. Rancher is taking existing open-source applications, repackaging and rebuilding them on an optimized Linux base container image using Rancher's own build systems. Smails said this provides the applications with inherent zero-trust and software supply chain security. The goal is for the collection to become a library of prevalidated applications that Prime customers can choose from, knowing they support security and supply chain standards.

In a bid to help improve user support (and because it's 2023, and no enterprise IT vendor can have news without mentioning artificial intelligence [AI]), SUSE is integrating a generative AI (genAI)-powered Rancher Prime customer assistant into its Slack support channel.

"It's conversational because it's a bot and you can ask it anything you want in the channel and it'll help you with installation, configuration performance and troubleshooting," Smails said.