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Cloud computing is big. By its very nature, we know that cloud computing is an enterprise-grade technology discipline designed to offer businesses the ability to expand their IT estate (in theory, almost infinitely) without having to outlay additional Capital Expenditure (CapEx) via a request to a hyperscaler Cloud Services Provider (CSP) for extra muscle and juice in the form of additional cloud instances, storage or other services such as big data analytics, AI and (one day soon) quantum computing accelerators.
Cloud computing is also supposed to be smaller i.e. flexible enough to be scaled back when certain application streams are not needed for a period, although this reality appears to be rarely discussed, showcased or highlighted.
Because we work with cloud services that are typically set for and structured for growth, the IT industry loves to talk about expansion, the ability to scale and that most favored term of all… ‘extensibility’.
Enterprise-grade open source solutions company SUSE is championing the expansion message for cloud in direct terms with its work to support container growth - containers being the discrete units of computing code (that contain everything needed to run an application workload or system process) that now help form composable cloud applications. Reliant on their host system operating system kernel (Windows containers run on Windows, Linux containers run on Linux), containers are an abstracted element of cloud computing systems, which are essentially virtualized and abstracted at their core in the first place.
Extensible orchestration
In a technology development that we could call orchestrated extensibility or perhaps more accurately, extensible orchestration, SUSE is upgrading its Rancher Kubernetes management platform (a technology it acquired from Rancher labs in 2020), which helps to orchestrate the growing universe of cloud containers.
The company has also expanded the enterprise-grade value of its open source commercial subscription for Rancher with the latest release of Rancher Prime (a branding label used to denote the paid-for version of this open source technology that comes with maintenance, support and the potential for extra services) as well as now also delivering updates to its popular open source projects like Rancher Desktop. It has also re-launched its free training portal, Rancher Academy.
“As the Kubernetes ecosystem expands and becomes more complex, innovation, interoperability and simplicity have never been more important. Our free-to-use Rancher UI extension framework empowers users and independent software vendors (ISVs) to create customized user experiences, significantly enhancing the operationalization of their entire Kubernetes environment,” said Peter Smails, general manager of enterprise container management at SUSE.
The feeling internally within the company is understood to be that Rancher’s User Interface (UI) extension framework will be popular with SUSE’s network of technology partners around the world. The SUSE One Partner Program now incorporates the ‘Tested & Certified – Rancher Extension’ certification, which allows partners to build and host extensions from within Rancher’s application catalog and validate their reliability through this certification criteria.
Customizing core Kubernetes
“SUSE continues to extend its leadership position as the world’s most widely deployed Kubernetes management platform with the release of Rancher 2.7.2. The new Rancher UI extension framework decouples the UI functionality from Rancher Manager and provides users with the ability to independently extend and enhance the Rancher UI. This gives users the capability to build on top of the Rancher platform and integrate Rancher into their environments by building custom, peer-developed or Rancher-developed UI extensions,” said Smails and team.
SUSE’s strategy for Rancher is to provide the core power of hybrid and multi-cloud multi-cluster management and for extension providers to deliver a highly customized user experience to their customers within the same pane of glass. Rancher Academy is a free educational service intended to help educate users as they get started with Rancher and Kubernetes. Courses within its platform include topics such as Kubernetes, container fundamentals, Rancher multi-cluster management and container security etc.
“Cloud-native expertise remains one of the biggest inhibitors to Kubernetes’ adoption,” said Tom Callway, VP of product marketing & community at SUSE. “By re-launching Rancher Academy, our aim is to help demystify the complexities of cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes and break down the barriers faced by users when deploying new workloads. With Rancher Academy, the Rancher users now have a free, high quality educational resource to increase their Kubernetes knowledge, helping users build faster and more securely.”
Is cloud getting easier?
The core question that needs to be asked - here… and again and again - is whether or not cloud computing (and container orchestration in the realm of Kubernetes) is getting any simpler or not?
On the one hand, we’re always hearing from enterprise technology companies who are working to differentiate their services from one another. On the other hand, we’re also constantly hearing from firms (as is the case here) talking about the ability to view and manage computing services through one single pane of glass. That’s fine, if all the extensions and innovations are developed on one single platform (as is being proposed here with the partner and peer-developed Rancher innovations), for unification and homogeneity.
In reality, we talk about heterogeneous computing environments a lot more than we talk about homogeneity, so there will inevitably be challenges ahead. What SUSE is doing is essentially open source, closely allied and tied to partner work and fundamentally developer-first (unashamedly geeky, in a good way, if you will), so it has to be lauded for that approach.
Cloud is still complicated though.
