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SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
- caymanjim 6y agoAnother great product acquired by a mediocre behemoth. Here's hoping they can maintain enough independence to continue innovating.
- aplanas 6y agoI 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 6y agoThis 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.
- mugsie 6y agoOne thing I would say about SUSE - they are never mediocre. (nor what I would usually consider a behemoth) The engineering team inside SUSE are exceptional - they do amazing things, and build really interesting features. The product planning / joined up thinking / visionary direction is where they fall down. As a sibling pointed out they have worked on some really interesting stuff, but (when I was there in any case) failed to pull it together into something that could have been outstanding.
- yellowapple 6y agoThere are many words I'd use to describe SUSE, but neither "mediocre" nor "behemoth" are among them.
- psankar 6y agoEx-SUSE engineer here. Without a doubt SUSE is the best place that I have worked for in my career of 15+ years, across multiple companies. They are neither mediocre nor a behemoth. They have some excellent engineers. SUSE has worked on Ceph even before RedHat acquired Ceph. OBS and SUSE Studio had envisioned containers even before the market was ready. SUSE has some prime contributors for Linux kernel, GCC, Linux HA etc. Greg KH was a SUSE employee once, before moving to linux foundation. Technologically, they are far from mediocre. In my personal experience, SUSE always felt that they had good engineers but somehow lacked the sense of making enterprise sales or generating postive news. The company being head-quartered in EU and not in California may also be a reason for the lack of the news. During my times, they were going through multiple rounds of acquisitions and nothing was stable in the vision of the company. The SUSE management did not feel like a Behemoth because they were trying to satisfy their investors in Novell, Microfocus, etc.
- leonardteo 6y agoWell 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 6y agoOne 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-k8s-a-benchmark-77a96bb1ac29 https://medium.com/@bratao/state-of-persistent-storage-in-k8...) It really transformed my company DevOps. I´m VERY happy. If you can, use Rancher. It is just perfect!
- 0xbadcafebee 6y agoAgreed, Rancher rocks.
- zumachase 6y agoWe're in the same camp with a cluster ~2x as large for Squawk[1] and it would cost us many multiples in the cloud (excluding our TURN relays which aren't k8s). However, the one killer feature that the cloud still has over self hosted is the state layer. There is nothing that comes close to the turn key, highly available, point in time recoverable database offerings from the cloud providers. We're running Spilo/Patroni helm charts, and we've really tried to break our setup chaos monkey style. But I'll admit I'd sleep better leaving it in Amazon's hands (fortunately, with all the money we save, we have multiple synchronous replicas and ship log files every 10 seconds). [1] Shamless plug Squawk: Walkie Talkie for Teams - https://www.squawk.to https://www.squawk.to _EDIT_ I've just read your blog post. We went the other direction and have used the local storage provisioner to create PVCs directly on host storage, and push the replication to the application layer. We run postgres and redis (keydb) with 3 replicas each with at least one in sync replication (where supported) and shipping postgres wal logs to S3 every 10 seconds.
- Scorpiion 6y agoIf 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.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/08/suse-acquires-rancher-labs.h...
- techntoke 6y agoJust enough to pay off their debt
- marcinzm 6y agoWhat do you mean? Rancher has raised only $100 million in funding from what I can tell.
- Scorpiion 6y agoYeah, 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).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- techntoke 6y agoMakes 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.
- mstipetic 6y agoRancher only sells support, which includes all things related to Kubernetes, not only their products
- leonardteo 6y agoHow are you using vanilla Kubernetes? I've tried provisioning vanilla K8s on bare metal clusters and I found it to be pure PITA, even with Kubespray. Rancher's RKE is the first installer I've come across that "just works". Run rke up against a cluster.yml and within minutes you have a HA cluster with ingress ready to rock. K3S is also looking quite good. In contrast I've spent days staring down the abyss of vanilla K8s. If you have good alternatives for launching K8S on bare metal/on-prem clusters, would be game to try.
- throwawaybbqed 6y agoI stood up a vanilla baremetal cluster (on the latest Ubuntu) a few days back using Kubeadm ... it was fairly trivial to do. I used the NGINX Ingress and it was also generally straightforward (maybe took an hour or two to understand what was going on). Curious what we did different? I saw Rancher's offering afterwards and it does look really slick .. the UI is bloody awesome. Wish I could get it for regular kubernetes.
- techntoke 6y agoKubeadm is the "official" and certified tool, not Kubespray. It is easily scripted as well. If you're used to graphical installers though and don't like automation then by all means continue to use Rancher.
- caiobegotti 6y agoOver half a billion of USD looks like real value to me, I wish I could make that much with vanilla Kubernetes and Helm charts. Let's be respectful for Rancher's fantastic exit.
- maratc 6y agoThe real news for me here is that SUSE still exists.
- SEJeff 6y agoThey're still quite popular in Europe and especially in Germany whereas Redhat has utterly dominated North America.
- mroche 6y ago> 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 6y agoSuSE is big on HPC and big beasts.
- SEJeff 6y agoRedhat is bigger on both. Scientific Linux, which was built exclusively for HPC, was based on CentOS.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoLuckily 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.
- ciguy 6y agoThis 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.
- omginternets 6y agoI 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?
- mikepurvis 6y agoI tried it briefly for homelab use and came to the same conclusion— I ended up feeling like I had a lot more of a safety net with a conventional Ubuntu/Docker/Portainer type setup than I did with Rancher.
- omginternets 6y agoYup. I should have specified that mine was a homelab setup as well (and was several years ago). It’s a shame because I still feel there’s a gap between docker-compose and Kubernetes. I don’t have k8-size problems, but I do have well-beyond-docker-compose-size problems.
- anewlanguage 6y agoDocker Swarm fills that gap pretty well in my experience. The best part is that it's an almost trivial migration to move from Compose to Swarm. Swarm to K8s is not so easy, even with tools like kompose.
- Legogris 6y agoI can vouch for Nomad, coupled with Consul and Vault. You can start simple, it scales well and with the recent and undergoing integrations with Consul Connect and Nomad you can go service mesh with mTLS if you want.
- leonardteo 6y agoNot 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.
- bovermyer 6y agoI'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 6y agoWhy would Red Hat (who created OpenShift) want to buy an inferior competitor?
- lproven 6y agoYou may well ask, but you are far, far too late. Red Hat already bought CoreOS in January 2018, some 18 months before IBM bought Red Hat. The question would have been more relevant to either of those.
- wwright 6y agoCoreOS was not a direct competitor to RHEL, it was intended to be a "next-gen" rearchitecture of the OS. No one was going to seriously consider using one in place of the other; if you were considering CoreOS, then RHEL was already off the table.
- type0 6y agoIt replaced Project Atomic for them, some parts from atomic ended up in core os though.
- peterwwillis 6y agoYou can buy an "inferior competitor" and integrate their feature set into your own products, and end up with a much better integrated solution for your customers, which will strengthen your business. But switch "inferior" to "superior" and your question makes sense. Red Hat's products mostly suck balls. I can't think of a single one which has been an enjoyable experience to use. People paid for them because they were the IBM of the Linux world.... And now they're the Linux of the IBM world.
- sandGorgon 6y agoCongratulations! K3s is something that I think could be a big impactful product in the kubernetes space.
- merb 6y agok3os aswell. but yeah k3s is really something that should be kept alive.
- ai_ja_nai 6y agoWhy?!? Why the worst enterprise distro out there had to?!? Canonical would have been perfect -________-
- tyldum 6y agoRancher 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.
- bg24 6y agoThis is a good acquisition. I was thinking that AWS would acquire Rancher to make inroads into multi-cloud and hybrid kubernetes.
- jacques_chester 6y agoI'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 6y agoAgree. All the while other are happily studying the ideas/services from AWS, and building better experience.
- tombh 6y agoAnyone 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 6y agoI'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.
- lma21 6y agoIs 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?
- justicezyx 6y agoCurious 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 6y agoHeltio or CoreOS both predate this.
- filmgirlcw 6y agoDeis too. And Deis was acquired twice, first by Engine Yard and then by Microsoft.
- justicezyx 6y agoHeltio AFAIK is mostly a educational and consulting business? They dont have a kubernetes product, right? CoreOS dont have a kubernetes product either, right?
- rossmohax 6y agoCoreOS had Tectonic
- justicezyx 6y agoOh right, I forgot that. I think at the point they were acquired, Tectonic was at very early stage. I could be wrong.
- cpitman 6y agoI assume that was a typo for "Heptio", who were acquired by VMware in 2018.
- AlphaSite 6y agoYes, Heptio, sorry.
- 6y ago
- dang 6y agoWe 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.
- pelasaco 6y agoI 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 6y agoAcquihire 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 6y agothat'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!
- athriren 6y agoAre you saying the upper management of SUSE is boring or the upper management of Rancher is boring? It’s unclear from the wording.
- pelasaco 6y agosorry at SUSE.
- yellowapple 6y agoWhat'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-versions/rancher-v2.3.4/ https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-terms/all-supported-...
- darren0 6y agoThat'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-versions/rancher-v2.4.5/ https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-terms/all-supported-...
- yellowapple 6y agoWeird. 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).
- metta2uall 6y agoThis 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).
- djhaskin987 6y agoRancher 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 6y agoWhat about KOPS? That's distro independent. I use Ubuntu but others are supported
- rubyfan 6y agoTIL: Suse is still in business