SUSE acquired Rancher Labs in 2020 and offers both a platform and a service solution for managing Kubernetes-orchestrated containers under the SUSE Rancher brand. The container management platform (SUSE Rancher) delivers functionality via a software subscription with a support contract while the container management service (SUSE Rancher Hosted) offers exactly the same functionality, but with SUSE staff performing the system operations, management and sustaining tasks, with a defined (financially-backed) service level agreement.
SUSE’s strategy has historically been to maintain tight alignment with upstream open-source code to enable customer interoperability and portability between environments. The solution suite includes single pane of glass management of heterogenous, multi-cluster customer environments, allowing customers to leverage containers across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Unlike many other companies, SUSE has chosen to not integrate specific application modernization services into SUSE Rancher but instead to address these requirements by offering customers the access to common open-source and ISV offerings. With the October 2020 acquisition of NeuVector, SUSE stepped away from their traditional open approach to add the advanced security features needed to support scaled-out container environments for enterprise customers. SUSE Rancher lacks the latest advances in AI-enabled observability, another area where rapid innovation is being delivered ahead of open-source deliverables.
SUSE has two solution delivery models for SUSE Rancher – the dominant installed model is customer self-managed, but customers can also avoid capital investment and some operations training while enabling faster time-to-usage by leveraging a SUSE-operated container management service (with defined SLA) offered on top of the AWS cloud (SUSE Rancher Hosted). This hosted offering supports management of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
SUSE Rancher Container Management Product Brief Includes:Â
- Overview
- Highlights
- Usage and Deployment
- EvaluScale Product Review Methodology
- Evaluator Group Opinion
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