Kathy Gibson reports – SUSE is positioning Linux and Kubernetes at the centre of digital transformation, and has launched a raft of solutions that address the data centre, the cloud and the edge.
Sheng, president: engineering and innovation at SUSE, explains that Linux and Kubernetes are foundational pillars for every company’s digital transformation strategy.
“And SUSE is a leader in both,” he says. “We all know SUSE is an open source company – but we do more than open source. SUSE’s phrase is ‘open open source’, which speaks precisely to the pain many companies feel. They feel trapped in a legacy software stack because vendors refuse to support other vendors’ software. Many open source vendors also use the power of certification and validation to tie customers in.
“SUSE products are guaranteed to work with other vendors, even if they are competitors. This philosophy is rooted in the belief that customers can work better if the solution meets their needs.”
Melissa di Donata, CEO of SUSE, adds: “Our open, interoperable approach to open source is unlike anyone else. We will not force you into any technology.
“And SUSE will never stop innovating,” she says. “Our commitment to open source innovation has never been stronger, we will remain 100% open source and will collaborate with the open source community to solve the world’s greatest challenges.”
At SUSEcon yesterday, Liang outlined SUSE’s strategy to target the cloud, the data centre and the edge with its open source offerings.
SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES) is the company’s flagship open source operating system offering, and is also the preferred operating system to run SAP.
SLE Micro is a lightweight Linux OS designed for edge environment. It is small and immutable, and supports transactional updates.
“We don’t offer just one Linux distribution, but a family of distros,” Liang says. “The ability to support, validate and certify so many distros is a unique capability. SUSE Linux is the most adaptable Linux distro in the industry.”
SUSE Manager is a valuable tool that provisions, installs, updates and configures SUSE Linux and also other Linux distributions.
“This is open interoperability at work,” Liang says. “And we are pushing the envelope on scalability – you can now use SUSE Manager to manage tens of thousands of servers in production.”
SUSE recently bought Rancher and added it to its Kubernetes offerings.
Now the company is offering two new solution stacks that combine SLES and Kubernetes.
SUSE Hybrid IT is the Linux and Kubernetes solution stack for data centre and cloud, while SUSE Edge is the stack for the edge.
SUSE Hybrid IT is 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 Edge is 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-containerised cloud-ready application workloads.