SUSE Updates Cloud-Native Tool Portfolio

At SUSECon in Berlin today, SUSE announced three significant upgrades to its cloud-native computing software family: Rancher Prime 3.1, NeuVector Prime 5.4 and Harvester 1.3.1.

From the top Rancher, SUSE‘s popular open-source software stack for running and managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across any infrastructure comes in two main commercial versions: SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Edge.

As always, Rancher Prime supports any certified Kubernetes distribution. It streamlines cluster operations, offering provisioning, version management, monitoring and centralized audit capabilities. It also enforces consistent security policies across all clusters, regardless of their location.

This latest release brings enhanced security and lifecycle management capabilities, enabling platform engineering teams to deliver self-service platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to their developer communities.

The first highlight in this release is Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA, pronounced Salsa) certification and the provision of software bill-of-materials (SBOM). Together, these ensure that the third-party software code you use in your applications is what it claims to be. With the rise of malicious code in popular programming repositories such as JavaScript’s npm and the Python Package Index (PyPI), it’s become more important than ever to be sure of your code.

Putting this into use, Rancher Prime introduces the general availability of the Rancher Prime Application Collection. This is a curated library of minimal, hardened developer and infrastructure images with signatures and SBOMs.

In conjunction with the just announced SUSE AI, the Rancher Prime AI Assistant enhances the user experience in several ways: First, it provides automated, accurate and real-time assistance to users through a dedicated Slack channel for seamless interaction. This functionality gives users timely support and troubleshooting help, improving efficiency.

In addition, it employs technologies like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and integration with OpenAI to generate contextually relevant responses. It does this by searching SUSE’s extensive documentation and knowledge base and the internet via Bing to provide comprehensive information.

Improve Your Team’s Learning Curve

This functionality will assist you with training, inquiries and troubleshooting. This should significantly improve your crew’s Kubernetes learning curve and problem-solving capabilities.

The Rancher Prime AI Assistant does not, however, have the capability to directly predict or prevent issues in Kubernetes clusters. Its chatbot-style interface is designed to provide contextual assistance to users by searching SUSE’s documentation, knowledge base and the internet to generate relevant responses.

Looking ahead, SUSE’s acquisition of StackState will bring comprehensive observability capabilities to Rancher Prime. Once SUSE has open-sourced StackState, these features will appear in open-source Rancher.

Complementing Rancher Prime is the release of NeuVector Prime 5.4, SUSE’s open-source container security platform. This update introduces egress network connection visibility, GitOps automation, and expanded support for Arm64 architectures, further strengthening NeuVector’s zero-trust security capabilities.

Rancher users can deploy NeuVector and monitor their cluster’s key security metrics via the NeuVector UI extension. This extension includes a cluster security score, ingress/egress connection risks and vulnerability risks for nodes and pods.

Finally, the Harvester 1.3.1 release adds support for creating virtual GPUs (vGPUs) and assigning them to virtual machines, enabling accelerated AI/ML workloads at the edge. This functionality, Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE EMEA CTO, added in an interview, might interest VMWare customers looking for a new platform.

Pfeifer explained that Harvester is “virtualization in a cloud-native context. If you are on a journey to containers and moving more and more into the cloud-native realm from virtual machines (VM), then Harvester is definitely worth a look.” With Harvester, you can still run your DBMSs on VMs and integrate them with your new container-based applications.

SUSE Support

Finally, SUSE announced that it will now provide three years of support across updates to its open-source portfolio.

What’s the point? As Peter Smails, GM of SUSE’s Enterprise Container Management business unit, said at the conference, “Our mission is to deliver the capabilities our enterprise customers require to deploy and manage their business-critical production workloads while also continuing to invest in innovation to support and grow our huge community of open source users.”