SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

https://www.zdnet.com/article/suse-to-acquire-rancher-labs/

by flyingyeti • 6 years ago

392 152 6 years ago

caymanjim2• 6 years ago

Another great product acquired by a mediocre behemoth. Here's hoping they can maintain enough independence to continue innovating.

aplanas2• 6 years ago

I think that is this a bit unfair for SUSE. We (I am employee here) have a long tradition of innovation and failing in communication.

We had OBS, that is some kind of build system as a service that guarantee reproducible builds and traceability of packages before that was a thing. We develop an automatically and deeply tested (openQA) rolling distribution (Tumbleweed) at the same time that other was telling in the forums that this was simply impossible to do. We have crazy ideas like MicroOS with transactional updates, together with good old classics like YaST, Zypper or linuxrc.

We are just a few, but we have tons of contributions in the kernel, gcc, btrfs, qemu, runc, openstack, saltstack, kubernetes and whatnot.

caymanjim2• 6 years ago

This is fair, and I'll admit it's a knee-jerk reaction to a product I like disappearing into a larger organization and possibly being neglected or shut down, as I've seen happen many times before. I hope it means bigger and better support for Rancher.

mugsie8• 6 years ago

One thing I would say about SUSE - they are never mediocre. (nor what I would usually consider a behemoth)

The engineering team inside SUSE are exceptional - they do amazing things, and build really interesting features. The product planning / joined up thinking / visionary direction is where they fall down. As a sibling pointed out they have worked on some really interesting stuff, but (when I was there in any case) failed to pull it together into something that could have been outstanding.

yellowapple4• 6 years ago

There are many words I'd use to describe SUSE, but neither "mediocre" nor "behemoth" are among them.

psankar• 6 years ago

Ex-SUSE engineer here. Without a doubt SUSE is the best place that I have worked for in my career of 15+ years, across multiple companies.

They are neither mediocre nor a behemoth. They have some excellent engineers. SUSE has worked on Ceph even before RedHat acquired Ceph. OBS and SUSE Studio had envisioned containers even before the market was ready. SUSE has some prime contributors for Linux kernel, GCC, Linux HA etc. Greg KH was a SUSE employee once, before moving to linux foundation. Technologically, they are far from mediocre.

In my personal experience, SUSE always felt that they had good engineers but somehow lacked the sense of making enterprise sales or generating postive news. The company being head-quartered in EU and not in California may also be a reason for the lack of the news. During my times, they were going through multiple rounds of acquisitions and nothing was stable in the vision of the company. The SUSE management did not feel like a Behemoth because they were trying to satisfy their investors in Novell, Microfocus, etc.

leonardteo4• 6 years ago

Well congrats to the team for the exit. But I am really hoping that this will continue the great momentum that Rancher has.

I've come to quite enjoy Rancher products. I think the work they are doing is fantastic and lowering the bar for entry into Kubernetes, especially for on-prem/bare metal. Just deployed 4 production RKE clusters on bare metal and also using K3S.

bratao3• 6 years ago

One more good experience. I created an cluster of dedicated servers ( 64 cores, 6TB of SSD storage and 256 GB of RAM, 1 GPU) using Rancher, for about 250 Euros/Month. This would cost at least 2k in a cloud such as AWS. There is a post about how I did with persistent storage here (https://medium.com/@bratao/state-of-persistent-storage-in-k8...)

It really transformed my company DevOps. I´m VERY happy. If you can, use Rancher. It is just perfect!

0xbadcafebee• 6 years ago

Agreed, Rancher rocks.

zumachase3• 6 years ago

We're in the same camp with a cluster ~2x as large for Squawk[1] and it would cost us many multiples in the cloud (excluding our TURN relays which aren't k8s). However, the one killer feature that the cloud still has over self hosted is the state layer. There is nothing that comes close to the turn key, highly available, point in time recoverable database offerings from the cloud providers. We're running Spilo/Patroni helm charts, and we've really tried to break our setup chaos monkey style. But I'll admit I'd sleep better leaving it in Amazon's hands (fortunately, with all the money we save, we have multiple synchronous replicas and ship log files every 10 seconds).

[1] Shamless plug Squawk: Walkie Talkie for Teams - https://www.squawk.to

_EDIT_ I've just read your blog post. We went the other direction and have used the local storage provisioner to create PVCs directly on host storage, and push the replication to the application layer. We run postgres and redis (keydb) with 3 replicas each with at least one in sync replication (where supported) and shipping postgres wal logs to S3 every 10 seconds.

smartbit• 6 years ago

Longhorn synchronously replicates the volume across multiple replicas stored on multiple nodes https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn

At first look the numbers in the colourful table near the end, Piraeus/Linstor/DRBD seems 10x faster than Longhorn 0.8. The article goes into great depth of the (a)synchronous replication options of Piraeus, but doesn't mention that Longhorn always does synchronous replication. I wonder why?

SUSE being full into btrfs and CEPH, I wonder if they will allow Yasker https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn/graphs/contributors to continue developing. At Kubecon EU & US 2019 https://youtu.be/hvVnfZf9V6o?t=1659 Sheng Yang explains how he tried to make Longhorn first class citizen Kubernetes Storage.

battery423• 6 years ago

Thats a great depiction of the power of one person with proper knowledge!

Get a little bit of money (in comparision to all those shiny great things), build it, wing it and provide a huge benefit :)

Keyframe• 6 years ago

Where did you rent dedicated servers?

GordonS2• 6 years ago

You mentioned somewhere that your servers were hosted with Hetzner - are you using their "cloud volume" block storage? Really curious to know what performance is like with this cloud attached SSD storage!

api2• 6 years ago

One thing that continuously irks me about K8S is that the bar is so high. Does it really need to be so complex? Does it really need so much mandatory complexity?

Is that complexity needed or do more complex things actually tend to win in certain markets because nerds like knobs?

doteka• 6 years ago

Eh, I’d say k8s with the help of Helm is about as simple as it can get to deploy and manage large clusters of networked applications. The equivalent done using e.g. Ansible playbooks would be far more complex.

If the complexity seems too much, it’s probably a sign you don’t need k8s.

leonardteo4• 6 years ago

Actually K8S itself as a standard is not complex/hard. If you are a developer and user/consumer of K8S, use it! If the cluster is managed by someone else, K8S is great.

It only gets complex when you have to provision & manage your own clusters. That's where Rancher really shines, as it makes it so much simpler to deploy and manage K8s everywhere.

BossingAround4• 6 years ago

You can use Docker Swarm. Mirantis since back-paddled on its plans to deprecate it. It's a great piece of SW if you don't need thousands of containers, but rather low hundreds (and if you don't need additional stuff like Istio, operators, etc.)

wwright2• 6 years ago

My experience with it has always been that it is delightfully simple for the task at hand. There's a wide surface area because it covers a wide problem space (distributed computing), but any individual task has always felt simple and very thoughtfully considered for me.

ojhughes• 6 years ago

Distributed cloud computing is complex, k8s provides a solid abstraction based on decoupled reconciliation loops that work together in a common control plane. One of the most compelling facets of k8s is this declarative and extensible architecture.

The collaboration between Service -> Deployment -> ReplicaSet -> Pod -> Container is a great example of how these reconcilers work together.

Yes, it has a lot of knobs and dials but you don't need to understand them to get going. Just pick up something like skaffold.dev and you can be productive very quickly

lambdasquirrel• 6 years ago

Yeah I would say similarly. My team is working with Rancher and found their permissions management to be a solid selling point, among other things. And you can terraform 99% of the things you need.

Scorpiion2• 6 years ago

If anyone else is thinking, how much? I tried to do some research and I found this:

"The companies announced the deal Wednesday but didn’t disclose the terms. Two people familiar with the deal said SUSE is paying $600 million to $700 million."

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/08/suse-acquires-rancher-labs.h...

techntoke7• 6 years ago

Just enough to pay off their debt

marcinzm• 6 years ago

What do you mean? Rancher has raised only $100 million in funding from what I can tell.

techntoke7• 6 years ago

Makes a lot of sense to sell now since Rancher doesn't offer a lot of value anymore compared to vanilla Kubernetes and a few Helm charts.

mstipetic• 6 years ago

Rancher only sells support, which includes all things related to Kubernetes, not only their products

leonardteo4• 6 years ago

How are you using vanilla Kubernetes? I've tried provisioning vanilla K8s on bare metal clusters and I found it to be pure PITA, even with Kubespray.

Rancher's RKE is the first installer I've come across that "just works". Run rke up against a cluster.yml and within minutes you have a HA cluster with ingress ready to rock. K3S is also looking quite good.

In contrast I've spent days staring down the abyss of vanilla K8s. If you have good alternatives for launching K8S on bare metal/on-prem clusters, would be game to try.

throwawaybbqed• 6 years ago

I stood up a vanilla baremetal cluster (on the latest Ubuntu) a few days back using Kubeadm ... it was fairly trivial to do. I used the NGINX Ingress and it was also generally straightforward (maybe took an hour or two to understand what was going on). Curious what we did different?

I saw Rancher's offering afterwards and it does look really slick .. the UI is bloody awesome. Wish I could get it for regular kubernetes.

techntoke7• 6 years ago

Kubeadm is the "official" and certified tool, not Kubespray. It is easily scripted as well. If you're used to graphical installers though and don't like automation then by all means continue to use Rancher.

caiobegotti2• 6 years ago

Over half a billion of USD looks like real value to me, I wish I could make that much with vanilla Kubernetes and Helm charts. Let's be respectful for Rancher's fantastic exit.

techntoke7• 6 years ago

They recently when through a Series D round for $75 million, but yet you believe they have half a billion in the bank? They were on their last leg begging for seed money to keep them afloat.

mugsie8• 6 years ago

The real value is the Install / Life Cycle orchestration - vanilla K8S has really marked that firmly as "not their problem" - which is the correct thing for them to do.

tstyle• 6 years ago

What does life cycle orchestration mean?

AlphaSite3• 6 years ago

Cluster API should hopefully obsolete that problem, sooner rather than later.

techntoke7• 6 years ago

You clearly haven't used or heard of kubeadm, which is a certified installer and lifecycle tool from CNCF.

maratc• 6 years ago

The real news for me here is that SUSE still exists.

SEJeff3• 6 years ago

They're still quite popular in Europe and especially in Germany whereas Redhat has utterly dominated North America.

mroche• 6 years ago

Redhat has utterly dominated North America

nods head Yup, sounds about right.

SUSE is used pretty widely used in the European financial sector, right? That’s what I remember hearing the most about it.

EDIT: I’m referring to non-personal workloads, i.e. enterprise. Pretty much everything I’ve come across in a working environment has been Red Hat based, I’m not talking about personal local or VPS environments. Ubuntu and Debian do have a presence, but not at the Red Hat scale from my experience.

CraigJPerry• 6 years ago

I’m in the UK and even though i have a SLED boxed media set somewhere from circa 2005 (YaST was cool, their Xen user experience beat any other distro at the time) - it was news to me that they’re still alive.

Anecdotally, i feel like RHEL dominates the UK enterprise linux market as well as NA

dexcs• 6 years ago

Afaik one big reason for this is that SAP supports only Suse with on-prem installations.

raesene9• 6 years ago

SUSE is a still moderately large outfit. Their last valuation was $2.5b in 2019 https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/15/suse-is-once-again-an-inde...

jacques_chester3• 6 years ago

For me the secondary news was "Telstra has a venture arm".

takeda2• 6 years ago

Aren't they 2nd place after Red Hat? I'm talking about distributions that are made for enterprises.

I heard for example that Intel was/is a huge user and used it on their computing farm.

takeda2• 6 years ago

I talked with someone from a North American company which runs their product on SuSE. And asked why SuSE was chosen instead of more popular Red Hat. Apparently Red Hat wasn't providing the premier level of support the company needed so they went with SuSE.

LeoPanthera• 6 years ago

Every now and then I try a Linux distro other than SUSE (currently, openSUSE) and am left disappointed.

Mostly it is the size of the repo. openSUSE has everything. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising, the Build Service also builds packages for distributions not their own: https://build.opensuse.org

And of course there's really nothing as good as YaST for system configuration.

They also provide a full aarch64 OS for the Raspberry Pi, something which is surprisingly still quite rare.

KozmoNau73• 6 years ago

SUSE 6.4 was my very first Linux distro, my dad had bought the full CD set because he wanted to try out "that Linux thing". We never did get it to work with our modem, but I had fun playing around in KDE and Windowmaker.

I've been through a number of distros; SUSE as mentioned, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Mint, KDE Neon, probably others that I've forgotten. I installed openSUSE Leap 15.2 on my laptop last week and immediately I felt right at home. KDE as the default desktop with no weird modifications nor excessive vendor branding, plus a well thought out default Btrfs partitioning scheme with good use of subvolumes (and CoW disabled on /var, nice detail) and snapshots for easy backups and rollback in case of botched upgrades or config changes.

The only minor gripe I have is their choice to ship Firefox ESR, but I understand why they do it, and it was easy to add the official repo for the latest release version.

ciguy• 6 years ago

This is great. I've always felt that Rancher was underappreciated in the DevOps world probably because it's deceptively simple and easy to use and we tend to gravitate to complexity. I know a number of companies that have switched to it after trying to roll their own Kube management unsuccessfully.

omginternets2• 6 years ago

I really liked the idea or RancherOS, but somehow it never quite lived up to its promise. In particular, the need to distinguish between root and non-root containers was surprisingly confusing in practice. It effectively broke the promise of “just worry about docker”.

Has anyone here adopted it over the long term? What made it stick?

Any ideas why SUSE would need/want this?

mikepurvis• 6 years ago

I tried it briefly for homelab use and came to the same conclusion— I ended up feeling like I had a lot more of a safety net with a conventional Ubuntu/Docker/Portainer type setup than I did with Rancher.

omginternets2• 6 years ago

Yup. I should have specified that mine was a homelab setup as well (and was several years ago).

It’s a shame because I still feel there’s a gap between docker-compose and Kubernetes. I don’t have k8-size problems, but I do have well-beyond-docker-compose-size problems.

leonardteo4• 6 years ago

Not sure about RancherOS and how much it factored into the sale. It could end up merged/transitioned into some Suse-container OS offering

The enterprise K8S business is compelling, especially all the shops using metal/on-prem. I settled on using Rancher and RKE for production clusters just because it was the simplest way to get HA clusters up within minutes without a PhD in K8S.

But I think a lot of the work they are doing on the other parts of K8S are really interesting: K3S, for example, could become very popular for running on IoT and ARM. K3S really put a smile on my face. You just run it and boom, you have a K8S cluster.

lproven2• 6 years ago

SUSE already has a container offering, CaaS Platform:

https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/

(Source: I worked on the documentation for v3.)

The partly-SUSE-sponsored openSUSE Project also has a container-centric distro, Kubic MicroOS:

https://kubic.opensuse.org/

So it is already active in this area, and yes, I agree, there's a good chance that RancherOS will end up merging or even replacing this.

tssva• 6 years ago

K3S is nice but I have found microK8s to be even easier to get setup and configured for the IoT and small ARM server cluster scenarios.

jacques_chester3• 6 years ago

Any ideas why SUSE would need/want this?

Momentum and credibility in Kubernetes land. Rancher has more of it. SUSE has a lot of experience in Kubernetes but hasn't gotten much credit for it or, I am guessing, many sales from it.

Disclosure: I work for VMware.

candiddevmike4• 6 years ago

SUSE just bought a golden ticket into the upper echelons of the CNCF. Rancher is also very profitable, way more than their kube offering.

perlgeek• 6 years ago

I think everyone and their dog is realizing that there isn't all that much money in the traditional OS business anymore, and are betting on cloud platforms of one kind or another.

Redhat invested quite a bit into openshift, IBM bought them (and mentioned Redhat's cloud strategy in the announcement as one of the major reasons).

Microsoft is doubling down on Azure, now SUSE wants a piece of the pie.

I'm not familiar enough with Rancher to tell you why those chose exactly them, but they had to do something.

type02• 6 years ago

I think everyone and their dog is realizing that there isn't all that much money in the traditional OS business anymore

I wish my dog was as smart as yours, he continues to pay for windos and runs IE since no one on the internet knows he's a dog

olafmol• 6 years ago

RedHat has Openshift, now SUSE has Rancher.

bovermyer• 6 years ago

I'm very glad that SUSE bought it and not Red Hat (or Microsoft).

This might give SUSE more inroads to the North American market, considering it's largely a European player at this point.

candiddevmike4• 6 years ago

Why would Red Hat (who created OpenShift) want to buy an inferior competitor?

lproven2• 6 years ago

You may well ask, but you are far, far too late.

Red Hat already bought CoreOS in January 2018, some 18 months before IBM bought Red Hat.

The question would have been more relevant to either of those.

peterwwillis• 6 years ago

You can buy an "inferior competitor" and integrate their feature set into your own products, and end up with a much better integrated solution for your customers, which will strengthen your business.

But switch "inferior" to "superior" and your question makes sense. Red Hat's products mostly suck balls. I can't think of a single one which has been an enjoyable experience to use. People paid for them because they were the IBM of the Linux world.... And now they're the Linux of the IBM world.

shagie• 6 years ago

It wouldn't be Red Hat as such... it would have been IBM. And the same question can be asked there with IBM Cloud Private and the UbranCode suite.

Look at it from IBM's perspective - battling business units are good and one of them will certainly be the best.

acdha3• 6 years ago

OpenShift is expensive and requires a significant O&M investment. If you want to use standard tools it’d be nice to have a managed standard Kubernetes option without paying for a lot of complexity your teams don’t want.

necovek• 6 years ago

I was actually a bit behind on the current SUSE ownership: last I remember was it getting acquired by Novell and entering into an agreement with Microsoft. I was thus confused by your comment.

For those like me, SUSE was sold off again in 2018 after like 5 acquisitions, and has been an "independent business unit" for a while now.

aplanas2• 6 years ago

TL;DR: https://www.eqtgroup.com/Investments/Current-Portfolio/suse/

But we are mostly independent now. I.e we choose the directions.

sandGorgon• 6 years ago

Congratulations!

K3s is something that I think could be a big impactful product in the kubernetes space.

merb2• 6 years ago

k3os aswell. but yeah k3s is really something that should be kept alive.

ai_ja_nai• 6 years ago

Why?!? Why the worst enterprise distro out there had to?!? Canonical would have been perfect -________-

tyldum• 6 years ago

Rancher and Canonical were partners for a while, and Rancher was supposed to be their frontend for a Kubernetes solution.

I was talking to both of them about on-prem solutions, and found the Rancher support covered Ubuntu hosts, and Canonical support covered Rancher. Was trying to understand which support contract we would need.

But something happened between the companies and they parted ways. And neither party would comment.

In the end, we ditched Rancher support. The price almost doubled from one year to another and covered very little. I was also unimpressed by the technical chops of the Rancher solutions architect they gave us, which didn't seem to know anything beyond the basic documentation on their site.

But we are using Rancher 2 and Rancher 1.6 in production and have been happy with the solution itself.

We are migrating our on-prem from VMware to OpenStack and may stick with Rancher as k8s provisioner if charmed k8s doesn't live up to the sales pitch.

We are a team of 4 people doing on-prem datacenters on 10+ sites around the world, so we need a little bit of plug and play.

bg242• 6 years ago

This is a good acquisition.

I was thinking that AWS would acquire Rancher to make inroads into multi-cloud and hybrid kubernetes.

jacques_chester3• 6 years ago

I'm doubtful.

AWS has a case of not-invented-here syndrome that is so severe that it doesn't technically qualify as NIHS. For one thing, NIHS requires you to accept that there is such a place as "not here".

bg242• 6 years ago

Agree. All the while other are happily studying the ideas/services from AWS, and building better experience.

tombh• 6 years ago

Anyone else using Rancher's Rio? They're PaaS offering? It's still early days, we're using for a microservices project and it seems good do far.

ianwalter• 6 years ago

I've used it and liked it. I hope they continue to develop it and get it to be production-ready, but I'm not betting on it.

lma21• 6 years ago

Is Rancher profitable? How did it rank in the "Managed-Kubernetes" business? Anyone using Rancher in production for large-scale applications? If so, what's your feedback?

justicezyx3• 6 years ago

Curious about the price.

This appears the first significant acquisition of a k8s ecosystem start-up. (Remember the hadoop frenzy) The price might set a sentiment for the entire market segment for a while.

AlphaSite3• 6 years ago

Heltio or CoreOS both predate this.

filmgirlcw• 6 years ago

Deis too. And Deis was acquired twice, first by Engine Yard and then by Microsoft.

justicezyx3• 6 years ago

Heltio AFAIK is mostly a educational and consulting business? They dont have a kubernetes product, right?

CoreOS dont have a kubernetes product either, right?

pas• 6 years ago

600-700M according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769905

dang• 6 years ago

We changed the URL from https://rancher.com/press/suse-to-acquire-rancher/ to what appears to be the most substantial third-party article.

It's true that the guidelines call for original sources (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) but we sometimes make an exception for corporate press releases, which tend to use obscure language, omit relevant information, and so on.

pelasaco3• 6 years ago

I see it more as acqui-hire. SUSE was missing some savvy technologist in the VP Level.. Sheng_Liang[1] balances it back. Beside him all upper management are ex-SAP with boring strategy, no innovation..

Disclosure: I work for SUSE

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_Liang

darren04• 6 years ago

Acquihire usually indicates the company failed to make a sustainable business and you are just buying the talent. I can say that is not the case here. Rancher's business was/is phenomenal on all counts. But regardless I look forward to working with you in the future.

Disclosure: Rancher Labs CTO

pelasaco3• 6 years ago

that's right, Rancher's business was/is phenomenal, but not extreme necessary for SUSE. In another hand skilled people like you all are what will help SUSE in the long term!

Welcome!

athriren• 6 years ago

Are you saying the upper management of SUSE is boring or the upper management of Rancher is boring? It’s unclear from the wording.

pelasaco3• 6 years ago

sorry at SUSE.

yellowapple4• 6 years ago

What's amusing to me is that Rancher's Support Matrix makes no mention of compatibility with SLES or openSUSE: https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-terms/all-supported-...

darren04• 6 years ago

That's a link to an old version. The latest versions do officially support SLES. I think it was added in the 2.4 release. https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-terms/all-supported-...

yellowapple4• 6 years ago

Weird. That "old version" is where e.g. https://rancher.com/quick-start/ points (if you click on the "supported Linux distribution" link).

metta2uall• 6 years ago

This sounds really good. Rancher has some cool products but to be honest I've been uneasy about the link of their name to cattle farming. I hope they change the name and continue the focus on bringing more efficiency to Kubernetes. For example I don't think the kubelet of a brand-new almost empty Kubernetes cluster should frequently be using 4% of a CPU doing who-knows-what.. (I've tried profiling it but with little luck - most time seems to be on futexes [for go channels?], and there are also heaps of system calls to gather data from cgroups).

djha-skin• 6 years ago

Rancher was the last independent kubernetes distribution (that was company backed) as far as I can tell.

There was also CoreOS, which has since been bought by RedHat, and Deis, since bought by Microsoft.

So now it's been turned back into an OS war. RedHat, SuSE, and Microsoft.This is fitting because kubernetes feels like an operating system for container clusters. After all, operating systems are just resource managers and schedulers like kubernetes is.

(For those interested, there are several kubernetes distributions that are not company backed and open source. Two of my favorites are Kubespray[1] and Typhoon[2].)

1: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray 2: https://typhoon.psdn.io/

jeppesen-io• 6 years ago

What about KOPS? That's distro independent. I use Ubuntu but others are supported

rubyfan• 6 years ago

TIL: Suse is still in business

SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

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