SUSE announced the availability of Rancher Prime 2.0, enhancing customers' ability to manage heterogeneous, multi-cloud Kubernetes deployments securely and at scale. SUSE also revealed updates to Rancher community edition, SLE Micro 5.5 and the future of SUSE Edge. The latest updates continue to meet the diverse needs of the developer while furthering SUSE's mission to provide choice. 

"With Rancher Prime we continue our focus on enhancing customer productivity by providing a simple and secure container management experience for their entire infrastructure including data center, multiple clouds, and the Edge," said Peter Smails, general manager of Enterprise Container Management, SUSE. "The release of Rancher 2.8 also demonstrates our continued commitment to our open source community users providing them with enhanced tooling and expanded Rancher extensibility."

Helping customers get more value from Kubernetes with Rancher Prime 2.0

Interoperable by design, Rancher Prime 2.0, SUSE's commercial enterprise subscription, delivers even more value and support for customers:

• Tighter Portfolio Integration and New UI Extensions (UIE): UI extensions simplify operations and enhance user productivity by building in the functionality of SUSE and third-party tools directly into the Rancher Prime UI. New UIEs include:
• NeuVector is now tightly integrated with Rancher Prime providing customers with a seamless container management experience from operations, management to security;
• Cluster API (CAPI) streamlines cluster provisioning across multi-cloud and hybrid providers to provide a singular, normalized implementation from edge to everywhere.
  

• Introducing the Rancher Prime Application Collection: Available as a tech preview, the Rancher Prime Application Collection is a curated library of developer and infrastructure applications. Built and packaged with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Base Container Images, customers can quickly and easily launch these applications with confidence knowing they are backed by SUSE's zero-trust principles and secure software supply chain security guarantees when building workloads and applications.
  

• Generative-AI powered Rancher Prime Customer Assistant: Now generally available in the Rancher Prime customer Slack channel, the assistant enhances the user experience by providing insight and guidance on myriad topics including installation and configuration, performance and troubleshooting.
  

• Benchmarking and Long-Term Service Support: Available exclusively for Rancher Prime customers, SUSE now provides documented performance benchmarking based upon horizontal (number of clusters) and vertical (pods and nodes) stress testing providing customers insight of how to optimize their deployments. To better align with their application lifecycles customers can now utilize Long Term Service Support (LTSS) for RKE2 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine v2), which extends production lifecycles up to two years.
  
  
• AWS and Azure Marketplace Availability: Building on the recently announced availability of NeuVector on AWS, SUSE announced that NeuVector will be available on Azure Marketplace and Rancher will be available on AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace by end of year. Marketplace availability provides customers with a simple means to deploy Rancher and NeuVector on hyperscalers while also retiring their cloud spend commitments.
  

Rancher Prime customer, Michael Nichols, Information Security Architect, Toyota Material Handling added, "Toyota is about lean management, and having the ability to spend cycles on other priorities instead of on a manually built system is indeed a big win. It used to take us hours or even days to work on an outage, but we haven't had to do that since implementing Rancher Prime."

Expanded Kubernetes support and Rancher platform enhancements

Rancher 2.8 is now generally available with new features including:

• Upgraded Kubernetes support: Rancher 2.8 adds support for Kubernetes 1.27 enabling users to leverage the latest Kubernetes enhancements, including better scaling of containerized workloads, tighter security, enhancements to the container runtime interface (CRI), and extended support for Kubernetes networking.
  

• Enhanced platform customization with new self-service secure Public API:
  The new fully documented public API allows users to tailor their deployment with public custom resource definitions (CRD) to tailor workloads, scale efficiently and streamline automation processes to meet their specific needs.
  

• Improved GitOps Workflows: Rancher's native GitOps functionality powered by Fleet now offers drift detection and drift reconciliation as part of continuous deployment processes.
  

Increasing security for containers at edge

SLE Micro 5.5, the ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system purpose-built for containerized and virtualized workloads, now allows users to download container and workload images from trusted registries. It also lets them transfer and integrate images for use in air-gapped environments. This allows processes to be created where direct access to registries is either not desired or not possible. Integrating compliance checks when transferring images into air-gapped environments is essential for maintaining security and the integrity of edge environments.

Positioning SUSE Edge for the future of Industrial IoT

For the first time this week, SUSE demos an early integration for SUSE Edge targeting the IIoT space, which will be available in 2024. Using Edge IIoT organizations can transition smoothly from legacy technologies to using modern edge workloads based on containers, Kubernetes and open standards.

In early 2024, SUSE will expand its partnerships for edge solutions with Buoyant and Synadia.

• SUSE will continue its work with Buoyant, creators of the Rust-based Linkerd service mesh, to implement mesh expansion capabilities to the service mesh. This will allow users to bring non-Kubernetes nodes and workloads into their Kubernetes landscape in a way that is secure and reliable, even across the open Internet, and will ultimately help bring customers' legacy systems into the modern world.

SUSE will continue its work with Synadia to expand the interoperability of NATS.io into the SUSE Edge stack, providing a scalable and high-performance cloud native infrastructure messaging system from Cloud-to-Edge. The joint collaboration includes both a "two-node High-Availability configuration" designed for resource-constrained edge deployments, as well as bundling NATS as a backend option for K3S via the KINE interface.