SUSE acquires Rancher

SUSE announced their intent to acquire Rancher Labs, on July 8th 2020. This acquisition is rumored to be valued at 600 million USD which is a huge investment for SUSE. This is the Open Source firm’s first major acquisition as an independent company.

Rancher’s portfolio includes Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) a full Kubernetes certified platform, K3s a lightweight Kubernetes solution designed for low power devices and Edge use cases, and Longhorn which is a persistent storage system designed for Kubernetes. These products join SUSE’s Cloud Native portfolio, including their existing Kubernetes based product SUSE CaaS Platform, their Cloud Foundry based solution designed to run on Kubernetes, SUSE Cloud Application Platform, and SUSE storage platform based on Ceph.

From a technology standpoint it will be interesting to see how SUSE integrates Rancher into their portfolio. RKE will likely replace SUSE CaaS Platform. RancherOS, Rancher’s purpose built OS for containers will likely be replaced by SUSE Linux MicroOS, but we will see how this plays out after the acquisition completes.

I’m interested to see how SUSE will use K3s in their portfolio. SUSE has made some interesting investments recently into ARM even going so far to release a version of SLES for the Raspberry Pi for industrial Edge use cases. K3s fits very well into that strategy and it will be interesting to see SUSE pull Raspberry Pi out of the hobbyist market and into the distributed Edge Computing space with K3s.

Congrats to the SUSE and Rancher teams on this acquisition and I’m looking forward to seeing how these two companies come together over the coming months.