Analyst(s): Mitch Ashley
Publication Date: March 25, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- SUSECON 2025 themes and innovations.
- Announcements and analysis of developer validate designs, software security, and private registry for security software sourcing.
- Announcements and analysis of AI observability and AI guardrail blueprints.
- Announcements and analysis of SUSE Linux, RHEL, and CentOS open source updates and support, and SUSE cloud offerings on AWS.
The News: During its 2025 annual global customer event, SUSE made multiple announcements across its four product categories: Linux, Cloud-Native, Edge, and AI. Frequently held in Europe, SUSECON 2025 was held in Orlando, Florida, from March 10 to 14.
Four leading themes clearly present during SUSECON 2025 were business-critical infrastructure, customer choice, accelerating cloud-native adoption, capturing AI workloads, and solid financial performance following SUSE’s return to a private company. Sub-themes of the conference included open source with multi-vendor support (particularly RHEL and CentOS), Linux infrastructure reliability and scalability, developer experience, security, and modernization.
Announcement Highlights:
- SUSE introduced DevX Validated Designs, providing development and platform engineering teams with validated designs and workflows that can be tailored to each customer’s requirements. The first validated design combines SUSE Base Container Images and language SDKs, Gitea or GitLab for source code control and build actions, and Fleet for continuous deployment to RKE2 or K3s clusters. The entire software lifecycle can be managed on one Rancher-managed Kubernetes cluster or span multiple clusters and clouds. SUSE Observability and SUSE Security can be used for debugging, operational oversight, and policy enforcement by platform engineers.
- SUSE Private Registry Early Access is SUSE’s secure private registry for sourcing, securing, and then internal customer distribution of software container images and artifacts. SUSE Private Registry can also operate in air-gap situations.
- SUSE Application Collection on AWS, SUSE Cloud Observability on AWS, and SUSE Rancher Hosted (available April) were announced.
- SUSE AI Observability provides tools for monitoring AI models in production environments, Expanded SUSE AI Library components (including Ollama LLM, Milvus vector database, Open WebUI and Pipelines, MLflow for MLOps, and Pytorch).
- AI Guardrail Blueprints, developed with Infosys, ensure responsible AI implementations. SUSE announced its partnership with Infosys and HPE to provide complete enterprise AI infrastructure solutions for business AI applications.
- SUSE strengthened its multi-vendor support with SUSE Multi-Linux Manager 5.1 (available June). It adds improved Role-Based Access Control, enhanced Ansible integration, bulk migration, and support for Amazon Linux 2023, and a technology preview of Raspberry Pi OS. SUSE launched SUSE Linux 16, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications 16, and SUSE Linux 15 Service Pack 7. Portworx by Pure Storage joined the supported vendors of SUSE Certified Storage for Virtualization.
For additional announcements, see the SUSE Newsroom on their website.
SUSECON 2025: DevX, Security, AI, Observability Take Center Stage
Analyst Take: Cloud-Native, application development, software security, observability, and AI took center stage at SUSECON 2025, a distinct change in this year’s annual global customer conference. With a growing product portfolio across Linux, Cloud-Native, Edge, and AI, it is becoming a challenge to just think of SUSE as a Linux OS company with a side business in cloud-native.
The new prominent innovations most in focus were the tools, platforms, and blueprints for developers, platform engineers, security staff, and operations teams to create, secure, and operate cloud-native applications more efficiently.
Infrastructure and Linux advocates were not disappointed, of course. The core underpinning of SUSE’s business, SUSE Linux announcements continued to play a prominent role at SUSECON 2026 as the scalable, reliable, production-ready Linux platform for enterprises. Strengthened in SUSE’s messaging was application and infrastructure modernization for on-prem and cloud implementations. SUSE continued to show its commitment to open source, both SUSE’s and security updates, CVE patches, and management tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, as SUSE Multi-Linux Support.
VMware migration using SUSE Virtualization (Harvester). Less than one year ago (June 2024), SUSE began positioning Harvester in the hotly contested VMware alternative market, emphasizing its ability to coexist with vSphere environments. SUSE eased the transition by supporting applications on a hybrid of VMware and SUSE Virtualization platforms.
Are Developer Tools In SUSE’s Future?
SUSE is very much an infrastructure company, and while we do not expect that to change, the definition of infrastructure is up the stack of Linux, Kubernetes (Rancher), operational and management tools. The focus is on how to best aid or entice developers to build more software and applications on SUSE’s platform and SUSE Rancher Prime. Enter SUSE DevX Validated Designs Early Access.
DevX “developer experience” Validated Designs are intended to provide a curated software and flow architecture from code to cloud, with all of the underpinnings of the workflows and containers laid out. Developers and platform engineers can pick up pre-configured Dev Containers with the supported Kubernetes stack, security and observability elements for cloud-native applications built in.
Figure 1: Investment Changes in Software Development Areas Over the Next 12-18 Months
2025 is timely for SUSE to make these moves into the infrastructure of software development workflows. Futurum’s most recent DevOps and Application Development research indicates technology leaders and decision-makers plan to increase spending on development environments, application security, observability, and code and artifact repositories over the next 12-18 months.
We are anxious to see the promise of DevX Validated Designs as the Early Preview should help SUSE zero in on their community and partners’ most desirable and useful designs. It’s not too big of a stretch to imagine one day a future incarnation of DevX Validated Designs built into AI models where agentic AI agents work alongside developers to generate pre-vetted, observable, and secured environments supporting AI-generated applications. To be clear, no mention of this was made by SUSE during the conference.
Underpinning these vetted designs are the SUSE Application Collection–applications, libraries, and Helm charts rebased to small SUSE Linux images, scanned along with a software bill of materials (SBOMs)—and the newly announced SUSE Private Registry Early Preview. The SUSE Private Registry is an Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant registry for storing, replicating, managing, and securing containers, images, and artifacts. This SUSECON 2025 interview does a good job of tying these elements into SUSE’s cloud-native strategy.
Also unveiled AI Observability at SUSECON 2025. Built on StackState’s strengths in observability of Kubernetes workloads, AI Observability extends visibility into AI workloads of all types on the SUSE AI Platform. This means SUSE can provide a cohesive Observability offering across cloud-native, AI, and traditional workloads and address EU AI Act requirements with SUSE’s Security Guardrails. Futurum expects to see more with SUSE Observability for operational purposes and moving observability earlier into the SDLC, integrated into development, testing, and platform engineering workflows, AI-generated code, and AI agent development.
What to Watch:
- While blueprints for software development aren’t novel, SUSE could take a leading role in streamlining the development and deployment processes, provided DevX Validated Designs Early Preview yields increased productivity and DORA metrics improvements.
- Innovation in AI Observability must be quick and continuous. Observability for AI is rapidly heating up among the leading Observability vendors, including Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, and LogicMonitor.
- The software supply chain security market is already well-established, with leading players including Chainguard, Checkmarx, OpenTex, Sonatype, etc. Look to see how SUSE positions its registry and supply chain offerings and whether SUSE can parlay its strengths in software infrastructure and cloud-native into success in software security.
- Look for further integrations across SUSE offerings that deliver cross-product capabilities rather than siloed products. SUSE could move from being viewed as software infrastructure to becoming a software infrastructure platform, both on-prem and in the cloud.
- SUSE has done well in its acquisition strategy of StackState, NeuVector, and Rancher Labs since 2020. That bodes well for PE firm EQT Partners to entertain targeted acquisitions in areas strategic to filling out an integrated product strategy.
You can read more about SUSE Rancher Prime and other SUSECON 2025 announcements on SUSE’s website.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
AI, Automation, Security, and Cloud Native Are Critical To Delivering Software
Who Wins The Agentic AI Software Development Race?
DevOps and Software Development See Substantial Growth with AI, Security, and Platform Changes
Are CEOs Ready to Seize AI’s Potential?
Author Information
Mitch Ashley is VP and Practice Lead of DevOps and Application Development for The Futurum Group. Mitch has over 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur, industry analyst, product development, and IT leader, with expertise in software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, DevSecOps, cloud, and AI. As an entrepreneur, CTO, CIO, and head of engineering, Mitch led the creation of award-winning cybersecurity products utilized in the private and public sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and all military branches. Mitch also led managed PKI services for broadband, Wi-Fi, IoT, energy management and 5G industries, product certification test labs, an online SaaS (93m transactions annually), and the development of video-on-demand and Internet cable services, and a national broadband network.
Mitch shares his experiences as an analyst, keynote and conference speaker, panelist, host, moderator, and expert interviewer discussing CIO/CTO leadership, product and software development, DevOps, DevSecOps, containerization, container orchestration, AI/ML/GenAI, platform engineering, SRE, and cybersecurity. He publishes his research on FuturumGroup.com and TechstrongResearch.com/resources. He hosts multiple award-winning video and podcast series, including DevOps Unbound, CISO Talk, and Techstrong Gang.
