SUSE, a provider of open source software solutions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise, Rancher Prime (a Kubernetes management platform), and NeuVector Prime (a Kubernetes container security platform), has unveiled significant upgrades to its cloud-native and Edge portfolio. These enhancements aim to help customers securely deploy and manage business-critical workloads across diverse environments.
Rancher Prime is SUSE's commercial offering of Rancher, a widely adopted open-source enterprise container management platform. With the release of Rancher Prime 3.0, several enterprise-grade features have been introduced, designed to enhance security, streamline software lifecycle management, and enable self-service Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities. These include:
- Enhanced Secure Software Supply Chain by attaining Supply-Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) certification and incorporating software bill-of-materials (SBOM) to ensure trusted software delivery.
- Updated Software Lifecycle Management, delivering consistent, repeatable releases aligned closely with the upstream Kubernetes lifecycle and offering the Rancher Prime Application Collection: a trusted, enterprise-grade distribution platform for open-source applications.
- Enabling platform engineering teams to provide self-service PaaS with new Cluster API and Cluster Classes, promoting scalability through automation.
- Optimizing SUSE's certified Kubernetes distributions RKE2 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine) and K3s to simplify the deployment of AI/ML workloads by detecting and using NVIDIA's container runtimes.
Additionally, SUSE introduces Rancher Enterprise, a comprehensive package encompassing multi-cluster management, OS management, VM management, persistent storage, and SUSE's own certified Linux distribution: Linux Enterprise Micro.
SUSE also announced several improvements to SUSE Edge, a highly validated, integrated, edge-optimized stack purpose-built for edge computing on an open-source foundation. SUSE Edge 3.0 offers a fully integrated edge platform, enhancing efficiency across edge infrastructure with a robustly secure cloud-native approach that can easily scale to deploy and manage tens of thousands of edge nodes.
SUSE Edge 3.0 is purpose-built to run with few resources in environments with intermittent or slow internet connectivity. Rancher Prime is at the centre of a zero-touch provisioning system designed to facilitate frequent updates using GitOps principles. Edge Image Builder helps bootstrap edge clusters at scale and with segmentation of Kubernetes resources and customer data.
SUSE targets a dual focus, meeting enterprise needs while nurturing its vibrant open-source community. SUSE continues to enhance their open-source offerings across its cloud-native portfolio, with notable enhancements including:
- Harvester 1.3.0: Introducing GPU card support for virtual GPUs (vGPUs) and technical preview availability of Arm support.
- Longhorn 1.6.0: Seamless performance volume backup and restoration operations between data engine versions.
- RKE2 and K3s: General availability of NVIDIA GPU support and full Arm support.
- NeuVector Prime 5.3.0: New features such as egress network connection visibility, GitOps automation, and expanded arm64 architecture support.
Rancher Prime 3.0 and SUSE Edge 3.0 will be generally available in April 2024, and the open-source offerings are available now.
