Best of 2022: SUSE Simplifies Kubernetes Management at the Edge
As we close out 2022, we at Container Journal wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022.
At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America conference today, SUSE announced it has integrated the latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro 5.3 with the company’s edge computing platform based on Kubernetes.
Keith Basil, general manager for SUSE Edge, says that capability makes it possible to unify life cycle management across both Kubernetes and the operating system a cluster is deployed on.
SUSE is able to achieve that goal because SLE is now fully integrated with a forthcoming 2.7 release of the Rancher platform it uses to manage Kubernetes clusters. In effect, SLE and Kubernetes clusters can now be managed via a single control plane using SUSE’s open source Elemental toolkit that can be used to manage any Linux derivative, notes Basil.
It’s still early days as far as deployments of Kubernetes at the edge are concerned but the Linux Foundation predicts edge computing will be four times larger than the cloud, with 75% of data being generated globally by edge computing platforms by 2025. Gartner similarly predicts that by 2025 more than 50% of enterprise-managed data will be created and processed outside of a traditional data center or cloud computing environment.
The primary driver of that growth is an increasing need to process and analyze data closer to the geographic location where that data is created and consumed. In fact, a large percentage of the Kubernetes applications deployed at the edge will be stateful in that some amount of data will need to be stored locally. In addition, SUSE is starting to see applications infused with machine learning algorithms that tend to process large amounts of data also being deployed on Kubernetes clusters at the edge, notes Basil.
In addition to providing the tools and platforms to manage edge computing environments, SUSE is also betting that many organizations will rely on its NeuVector software to ensure the security of Kubernetes clusters deployed at the edge, Basil adds. A forthcoming release of SUSE NeuVector 5.1 will add centralized management of vulnerability scanning and admission control capabilities along with auto-scaling capabilities. In addition, SUSE will be adding support for the Kubernetes pod security admission (PSA) standard and a plug-in for networks based on the open source Cilium project.
Finally, SUSE is making available tools for the Open Zero Trust project, a project being overseen by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that is based on the edition of NeuVector that SUSE recently made available to the open source community.
In general, deployments of Kubernetes at the edge are already occurring today most frequently in the retail and manufacturing sectors but it’s only a matter of time before other vertical industries follow suit, added Basil.
Less clear is which IT teams will manage these highly distributed computing environments. Many Kubernetes clusters are starting to be deployed in the domains of operational technology (OT) professionals that have little to no experience managing complex clusters. As a result, as many organizations deploy Kubernetes at the edge, they will move to narrow the divide between OT and IT professionals.
