With no disrespect to SUSE, it's great to see them doing something to stay relevant. Subjectively, it feels like majority of their strategy was to stay somewhat compatible with Red Hat and benefit from a lot of their work.
That's perfectly fine, but doesn't win you a lot of customers. I really want to see SUSE thrive, and this seems like a great move.
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.
Rancher has been a strong up-and-comer. I'd fully expected them to be snapped up by one of the hyperscalers. SUSE were smart to grab them before they became overpriced.
Disclosure: I work for VMware, which competes with Rancher in some areas.
Redhat more or less tossed their Atomic distribution in the bin and replaced it with Redhat CoreOS, which is all of the tech from CoreOS but built ontop of the redhat package repository. The upstream is Fedora CoreOS:
Much of CoreOS has become the base for OpenShift 4. It's now called RHCOS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS ) and is the base host operating system for OpenShift. Also it's using CoreOS Ignition for installation.
I'm not sure how impactful CoreOS has been for RedHat (not a user)... I just meant that it would be nice if RancherOS or something based on its ideas became SUSE's "distribution for containers".
I've worked a fair amount with Rancher's OSS tooling like remotedialer and k3s - a big fan of it and went on to produce https://k3sup.dev/
Hoping that k3s will continue to exist and be invested in after the SuSE acquisition.