SUSE[1], a major Linux and cloud company, finalized its acquisition of Rancher Labs[2] earlier this year.. Rancher, formerly a privately held open-source company, had over 37,000 active users and 100-million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes[3] management program, Rancher[4].
SUSE is putting Red Hat[5] and other Kubernetes powerhouse companies on notice that they mean to be a Kubernetes giant as well.
Why? Because the Rancher program is a market-leading complete Kubernetes software stack. This stack can handle the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across almost any infrastructure. Specifically, it supports any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)[6]-certified Kubernetes distribution. This includes Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and Microsoft AKS.
The Rancher stack also enables companies to manage Kubernetes clusters across hybrid-clouds with centralized authentication, access control, and monitoring. With it, you can easily deploy Kubernetes clusters on bare metal, private clouds, public clouds, or VMware vSphere[7] and secure them using global security policies. It uses Kubernetes's native Helm[8], or its own app catalog, to deploy and manage applications across these environments. This enables you to maintain multi-cloud cluster consistency with a single deployment.
This is all being done with a pure open-source stack, as SUSE remains committed to delivering 100% open-source technologies. Rancher, which will continue to run as its own entity, will support multiple Kubernetes distributions and operating systems.
SUSE's acquisition is part of a Kubernetes merger and acquisition trend. "The Kubernetes marketplace saw significant consolidation in 2019[9] with the acquisitions of Heptio and Pivotal by VMware, and Red Hat by IBM," said Sheng Liang, former Rancher CEO and, now SUSE's president of engineering and innovation. With this