Well congrats to the team for the exit. But I am really hoping that this will continue the great momentum that Rancher has.<p>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.
I'm very glad that SUSE bought it and not Red Hat (or Microsoft).<p>This might give SUSE more inroads to the North American market, considering it's largely a European player at this point.
If anyone else is thinking, how much? I tried to do some research and I found this:<p>"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."<p>Source: <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/08/suse-acquires-rancher-labs.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/08/suse-acquires-rancher-labs.h...</a>
I 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..<p>Disclosure: I work for SUSE<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_Liang" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_Liang</a>
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.
I 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”.<p>Has anyone here adopted it over the long term? What made it stick?<p>Any ideas why SUSE would need/want this?
Rancher was the last independent kubernetes distribution (that was company backed) as far as I can tell.<p>There was also CoreOS, which has since been bought by RedHat, and Deis, since bought by Microsoft.<p>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.<p>(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].)<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray</a>
2: <a href="https://typhoon.psdn.io/" rel="nofollow">https://typhoon.psdn.io/</a>
Curious about the price.<p>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.
Is 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?
Anyone 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.
What's amusing to me is that Rancher's Support Matrix makes no mention of compatibility with SLES or openSUSE: <a href="https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-terms/all-supported-versions/rancher-v2.3.4/" rel="nofollow">https://rancher.com/support-maintenance-terms/all-supported-...</a>
We changed the URL from <a href="https://rancher.com/press/suse-to-acquire-rancher/" rel="nofollow">https://rancher.com/press/suse-to-acquire-rancher/</a> to what appears to be the most substantial third-party article.<p>It's true that the guidelines call for original sources (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a>) but we sometimes make an exception for corporate press releases, which tend to use obscure language, omit relevant information, and so on.
This 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).