SUSE Accelerates the Pace of Cloud-Native Innovation with Major Advances in Harvester and Beta Open Source Projects

October 11, 2021


  • Debuting at KubeCon North America, Harvester unifies the delivery of virtual machines and containerized workloads from within SUSE Rancher
  • SUSE is driving production-quality Kubernetes everywhere with beta releases for innovative open source projects Epinio, Kubewarden, Opni and Rancher Desktop

Los Angeles (KubeCon North America)

SUSE®, a global leader in innovative, reliable and enterprise-grade open source solutions, today announced the integration of SUSE Rancher with Harvester, forming a comprehensive open source hyperconverged solution (HCI) that accelerates digital transformation by allowing enterprises to consolidate, simplify and modernize their existing IT operations. Since its acquisition of Rancher Labs in December 2020, SUSE has reinforced its commitment to driving innovation in its cloud-native portfolio by investing in open source projects like Harvester, Epinio, Kubewarden, Opni, and Rancher Desktop. All these platforms will be demoed at SUSE’s KubeCon North America booth P3.

Open Source HCI for Cloud-Native Use Cases On-Premises and at the Edge

Headlining for SUSE at KubeCon North America is the integration of SUSE Rancher with Harvester, a solution that unifies the delivery of virtual machines and containers, without the complexities, lock-in, and overhead costs imposed by legacy vendors. Harvester is designed to leverage SUSE Rancher’s GitOps-powered continuous delivery capabilities to manage potentially thousands of HCI clusters running a mix of virtual machines (VM) and containerized workloads from core to edge. SUSE Rancher users can now create Kubernetes clusters on Harvester VMs. Harvester, on the other hand, can leverage SUSE Rancher to provide centralized user authentication and multi-cluster management.

“By providing free, unvetted access to open source projects like Harvester, we’re accelerating digital transformation,” said Sheng Liang, president of Engineering and Innovation at SUSE. “Further, by investing in these projects, we’re providing customers with the technology they need to bridge the gap between legacy and cloud-native IT. Harvester is just one example of the technology delivered when we invest in open source innovation.

Simplified Kubernetes Management and Application Delivery

In keeping with their rapid innovation ethos, SUSE also announced a host of additional open source projects, including:

  • Rancher Desktop: The installation of Kubernetes is designed to be simple, but it can require additional knowledge if a company needs to reset a cluster to test an app in different Kubernetes versions. Rancher Desktop makes running Kubernetes and Docker workloads on a local development PC or Mac significantly easier by removing the startup barrier.
  • Epinio: Designed to allow engineers to write code that will be deployed on Kubernetes without spending the time or money to teach everyone a new platform, Epinio allows users to bring an application from source code to deployment. It does this by providing the correct abstractions to developers while allowing operators to continue working in an environment they are comfortable with.
  • Opni: Observability data is part of every Kubernetes environment, but few use it effectively to gather available insights about the health of their operating systems and potential downtime for clusters and applications. SUSE is uniquely positioned to provide anomaly detection by applying Artificial Intelligence to Kubernetes through Opni, which provides log and metric anomaly detection for Kubernetes clusters.
  • Kubewarden: Security remains a prominent barrier for Kubernetes adoption, and SUSE’s latest project Kubewarden is designed to help remove that obstacle. Kubewarden provides significantly more flexibility compared to other solutions in today’s market as it allows for policies to be written in any language that can compile to WebAssemblies (WASM), including OPA’s rego language. It allows operations and governance teams to codify the rules of what can and cannot be run in their environments. Policies are distributed through container registries, and workloads and policies can be distributed and secured in the same way – ultimately removing bottlenecks organizations face and reducing the time DevOps teams need to spend reviewing policies.

For more information about SUSE’s open source projects, visit community.suse.com/feed.

About SUSE

SUSE is a global leader in innovative, reliable and enterprise-grade open source solutions, relied upon by more than 60% of the Fortune 500 to power their mission-critical workloads. We specialize in Enterprise Linux, Kubernetes Management, and Edge solutions, and collaborate with partners and communities to empower our customers to innovate everywhere – from the data center, to the cloud, to the edge and beyond. SUSE puts the “open” back in open source, giving customers the agility to tackle innovation challenges today and the freedom to evolve their strategy and solutions tomorrow. The company employs nearly 2000 people globally and is listed in the regulated market (Prime Standard) of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. For more information, visit www.suse.com.

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