SUSE®, the company behind SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), Rancher and NeuVector, today announced the availability of Rancher Prime 2.0, enhancing customers' ability to manage heterogeneous, multi-cloud Kubernetes deployments securely and at scale. SUSE also revealed updates to Rancher community edition, SLE Micro 5.5 and the future of SUSE Edge. The latest updates continue to meet the diverse needs of the developer while furthering SUSE's mission to provide choice.
"With Rancher Prime we continue our focus on enhancing customer productivity by providing a simple and secure container management experience for their entire infrastructure including data center, multiple clouds, and the Edge," said Peter Smails, general manager of Enterprise Container Management, SUSE. "The release of Rancher 2.8 also demonstrates our continued commitment to our open source community users providing them with enhanced tooling and expanded Rancher extensibility."
Helping customers get more value from Kubernetes with Rancher Prime 2.0
Interoperable by design, Rancher Prime 2.0, SUSE's commercial enterprise subscription, delivers even more value and support for customers:
- Tighter Portfolio Integration and New UI Extensions (UIE): UI extensions simplify operations and enhance user productivity by building in the functionality of SUSE and third-party tools directly into the Rancher Prime UI. New UIEs include:
- NeuVector is now tightly integrated with Rancher Prime providing customers with a seamless container management experience from operations, management to security;
- Cluster API (CAPI) streamlines cluster provisioning across multi-cloud and hybrid providers to provide a singular, normalized implementation from edge to everywhere.
- Introducing the Rancher Prime Application Collection: Available as a tech preview, the Rancher Prime Application Collection is a curated library of developer and infrastructure applications. Built and packaged with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Base Container Images, customers can quickly and easily launch these applications with confidence knowing they are backed by SUSE's zero-trust principles and secure software supply chain security guarantees when building workloads and applications.
- Generative-AI powered Rancher Prime Customer Assistant: Now generally available in the Rancher Prime customer Slack channel, the assistant enhances the user experience by providing insight and guidance on myriad topics including installation and configuration, performance and troubleshooting.
- Benchmarking and Long-Term Service Support: Available exclusively for Rancher Prime customers, SUSE now provides documented performance benchmarking based upon horizontal (number of clusters) and vertical (pods and nodes) stress testing providing customers insight of how to optimize their deployments. To better align with their application lifecycles customers can now utilize Long Term Service Support (LTSS) for RKE2 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine v2), which extends production lifecycles up to two years.
- AWS and Azure Marketplace Availability: Building on the recently announced availability of NeuVector on AWS, SUSE announced that NeuVector will be available on Azure Marketplace and Rancher will be available on AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace by end of year. Marketplace availability provides customers with a simple means to deploy Rancher and NeuVector on hyperscalers while also retiring their cloud spend commitments.
Rancher Prime customer, Michael Nichols, Information Security Architect, Toyota Material Handling added, "Toyota is about lean management, and having the ability to spend cycles on other priorities instead of on a manually built system is indeed a big win. It used to take us hours or even days to work on an outage, but we haven't had to do that since implementing Rancher Prime."