SUSE in Container Orchestration

Yes, SUSE being one of the top Linux open source software distributors has made a tremendous contribution in the Container Orchestration space with open source Kubernetes on the bottom layer. The story of SUSE's Container Orchestration journey kicked off after its acquisition of Rancher Labs (in the year 2020*) which was one the leading Container Orchestration distributions in the world. As of now, SUSE Rancher is one of the widely used Container Orchestration platforms around the world, The Red Hat OpenShift, VMware  Tanzu, Hasicorp Nomad, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos etc, are some of the other leading Container Orchestration platforms available in market. Lets not forget the Container Orchestration options available from the hyperscalers such as Microsoft's AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service), Google's GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine), AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) etc,. which are considered as Managed Container Orchestration Tools. 

What do we have from SUSE for container orchestration? 

SUSE currently offers & develops the below list of Kubernetes (K8s) distributions which are open source and driven by community:

• Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE)

• Rancher Kubernetes Engine2 (RKE2)

• K3S (Lightweight Rancher Kubernetes distro)

• Rancher

Advantages or benefits of the above open source Rancher Kubernetes distros:

• open source and no cost involved

• easy deployment 

• vendor independence 

• integrated with kubectl and rke tools

• CNCF certified 

• IoT and Edge deployments (K3S)

On other hand SUSE offers the following flagship Rancher commercial versions:

1- Rancher Prime 

2- Rancher Prime Hosted

Advantages or benefits of the above premier Rancher Kubernetes distros:

• Dedicated round the clock support

• Day 2 Support & Support Posture Assessment

• Scale on Demand

• CNCF certified

• Easy to onboard & integrate Hybrid and Multi Cloud workloads

• Unified GUI interface

Glimpse of RKE, RKE2 & K3S

	RKE	RKE2	K3S
What is it?	SUSE’s traditional K8s distro	- SUSE's nextgen hardened K8s distro.  - RKE2 was formerly known as RKE Government. - FIPS 140-2 compliance enabled	SUSE’s lightweight K8s distro.
Is CNCF Certified?	Yes	Yes	Yes
Runtime engine	docker	containerd	containerd
Runs as a systemd service?	No	Yes	Yes
Other features	Runs entirely on docker & offers full K8s experience.	- Focuses on security & compliance. - Used in high secure data centers.	- Used in Edge & IoT space. - Lightweight deployment use cases.
CNI Plugins*	Canal (default), Flannel, Calico and Weave	Canal (default), Cillium, Calico and Multus	Flannel
Default Config File	/etc/rancher/rke/cluster.yml	/etc/rancher/rke2/config.yml	/etc/rancher/k3s/config.yml
Default Database	etcd	etcd	SQlite
Download link	https://github.com/rancher/rke/releases	https://get.rke2.io	https://get.k3s.io/

So, RKE2 is functionally K3S + Additional Security + HA & is built on-top of K3S. 

“Rancher is a complete software stack for teams adopting containers. It addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across any infrastructure, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads” [ from https://www.rancher.com/why-rancher ]

Rancher is :

1- capable of provisioning K8s from a hosted provider

2- can provision a compute nodes and install K8s on them

3- capable of importing existing K8s cluster from anywhere

Glimpse of Rancher, Rancher Prime & Rancher Prime Hosted

	Rancher	Rancher Prime	Rancher Prime Hosted
What is it?	The community’s favorite Kubernetes management platform	An enterprise grade K8s distribution from SUSE Rancher.	The premium white-glove service for managing Rancher Prime which is a SaaS solution.
Is CNCF Certified?	Yes	Yes	Yes
Is support offered from SUSE?	No, as it is community driven.	Yes	Yes
Rancher Knowledgebase: Onboarding, Training & Enablement	Only basic documentation and training	- Extended documentation & reference architectures. - Day 2 Support & Support Posture Assessment	- Extended documentation & reference architectures. - Day 2 Support & Support Posture Assessment
Rancher for the Edge	Yes	Yes	Yes
Other notable features		- Get invited to Customer Advisory Boards & involve in Rancher roadmap.  - Certified & Supported Rancher UI Extensions	- Start with day 2 operations - Scale on Demand - Get invited to Customer Advisory Boards & involve in Rancher roadmap.  - Certified & Supported Rancher UI Extensions

References:

https://www.suse.com/news/suse-completes-rancher-acquisition/

https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kubernetes_logo_without_workmark.svg

https://www.rancher.com/brand-guidelines