
SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs - flyingyeti
https://www.zdnet.com/article/suse-to-acquire-rancher-labs/
======
leonardteo
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.

~~~
bratao
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...](https://medium.com/@bratao/state-of-persistent-storage-in-k8s-a-
benchmark-77a96bb1ac29))

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

~~~
smartbit
Longhorn _synchronously replicates the volume across multiple replicas stored
on multiple nodes_
[https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn](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](https://github.com/longhorn/longhorn/graphs/contributors)
to continue developing. At Kubecon EU & US 2019
[https://youtu.be/hvVnfZf9V6o?t=1659](https://youtu.be/hvVnfZf9V6o?t=1659)
Sheng Yang explains how he tried to make Longhorn first class citizen
Kubernetes Storage.

~~~
darren0
Longhorn serves a very difference use case than btrfs and CEPH so continued
investment makes sense.

Disclaimer: I'm the Rancher Labs CTO

------
bovermyer
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.

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

~~~
acdha
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.

~~~
BossingAround
> If you want to use standard tools it’d be nice to have a managed standard
> Kubernetes option

What standard tool doesn't work on OpenShift? It's certified to have 100%
compatibility with Kubernetes, it just adds stuff, doesn't it?

~~~
ofrzeta
It takes away privileges which arguably is a good thing but some things that
require root containers wont't run. They pass the Kubernetes conformance suite
only by removing those constraints.

~~~
candiddevmike
That's not true at all. You can read their CNCF results yourself, nothing is
disabled. And the conformance tooling works around these constraints by
defining their own PSPs.

~~~
ofrzeta
It would help if you provided a link to the CNCF results.

From what I see in
[https://github.com/openshift/origin/blob/master/test/extende...](https://github.com/openshift/origin/blob/master/test/extended/conformance-k8s.sh)
there are additional policies granted (search for "Disable container
security").

~~~
smarterclayton
Yes, to run tests that root your whole cluster, the test running for
conformance grants “root your cluster” permissions.

I occasionally regret the defaults we picked because people get frustrated
that random software off the internet doesn’t run.

That said, every severe (or almost every) container runtime vulnerability in
the last five years has not applied to a default pod running on OpenShift, so
there’s at least some comfort there.

To grant “run as uid 0” is a one line RBAC as assignment. To grant “run as uid
0 and access host” is a similar statement.

[https://github.com/openshift/origin/blob/master/test/extende...](https://github.com/openshift/origin/blob/master/test/extended/conformance-k8s.sh#L67)

------
Scorpiion
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...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/08/suse-acquires-rancher-labs.html)

~~~
techntoke
Just enough to pay off their debt

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

~~~
Scorpiion
Yeah, I did not really understand that comment either. According to the same
article they had more than 1/3 of their raised funds still in the bank (1/3 of
$95 million).

------
pelasaco
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_Liang)

~~~
darren0
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

~~~
pelasaco
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!

------
ciguy
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.

------
sandGorgon
Congratulations!

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

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

------
omginternets
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?

~~~
leonardteo
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.

~~~
lproven
SUSE already has a container offering, CaaS Platform:

[https://www.suse.com/products/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/](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.

------
djhaskin987
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](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray) 2:
[https://typhoon.psdn.io/](https://typhoon.psdn.io/)

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

------
justicezyx
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.

~~~
AlphaSite
Heltio or CoreOS both predate this.

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

CoreOS dont have a kubernetes product either, right?

~~~
rossmohax
CoreOS had Tectonic

~~~
justicezyx
Oh right, I forgot that. I think at the point they were acquired, Tectonic was
at very early stage. I could be wrong.

------
lma21
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?

------
tombh
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
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.

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

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

~~~
mroche
> 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.

~~~
anthk
SuSE is big on HPC and big beasts.

~~~
SEJeff
Redhat is bigger on both.

Scientific Linux, which was built exclusively for HPC, was based on CentOS.

~~~
KozmoNau7
Luckily it's not winner takes all, nor is it "second place is the first
loser".

SUSE may be overlooked from a US perspective, which is why they get much less
coverage than they deserve on sites like HN. They are huge in Europe and
employ some exceptionally good people, and have been making probably the most
solid distro out there since ~1994.

~~~
SEJeff
Oh I totally agree with you. Suse Linux 6.0 was my very first linux
distribution around 1998 or 1999. I've professionally managed SLES, SLED, and
even migrated a netware server to open enterprise server. It is great stuff
and I'm glad to see it still alive.

The market is big enough for multiple large Linux distributions (Redhat _,
SUSE_ , and Debian^WUbuntu*). The market continues to grow as more things
transition to computers.

------
yellowapple
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-...](https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-terms/all-
supported-versions/rancher-v2.3.4/)

~~~
darren0
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-...](https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-
terms/all-supported-versions/rancher-v2.4.5/)

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

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

~~~
aplanas
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.

~~~
caymanjim
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.

------
bg24
This is a good acquisition.

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

~~~
jacques_chester
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".

~~~
bg24
Agree. All the while other are happily studying the ideas/services from AWS,
and building better experience.

------
rubyfan
TIL: Suse is still in business

------
dang
We changed the URL from [https://rancher.com/press/suse-to-acquire-
rancher/](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](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.

------
techntoke
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.

~~~
mugsie
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.

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

~~~
mugsie
Hopefully, but Cluster API relies on something like Rancher (or AKS/EkS/GKE)
to do the deployment underneath it - it still kind of outsources the life
cycle.

------
metta2uall
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).

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

~~~
tyldum
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.

