SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs • Hacker News Board

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#141

Post by zumachase » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 6:52 AM UTC

jb_gericke wrote: post #137

zumachase wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we needed geographic distribution so that we don't end up hairpinning our users, and they only run a single service so the value prop is much lower. We use route 53 to do geodns across a number of cheap instances around the world (which is also nice, let's you pick regions with cheap bandwidth but good latency to major metro areas). We currently have TURN relays in Las Vegas, New York, and Amsterdam and that…

Interesting! Is that a single K8 control plane across one cluster? We've gone with fully isolated clusters across 2 data centers to protect against a network isolation incident between them causing a split brain/borking etcd.

Yes the control plane is only in one of the data centers. The other only runs admin services like offsite backups, our development infra (gitlab, etc) and CI/CD.

We could definitely do two clusters and probably should, but the secondary data center has few services that it wasn’t really worth the extra work.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#142

Post by KozmoNau7 » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 6:56 AM UTC

SEJeff wrote: post #126

anthk wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SuSE is big on HPC and big beasts.

Redhat is bigger on both. Scientific Linux, which was built exclusively for HPC, was based on CentOS.

Luckily 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.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#143

Post by KozmoNau7 » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 7:00 AM UTC

mroche wrote: post #20

SEJeff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're still quite popular in Europe and especially in Germany whereas Redhat has utterly dominated North America.

> 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…

> SUSE is used pretty widely used in the European financial sector, right? That’s what I remember hearing the most about it.

SLES is recommended for SAP installs, a huge enterprise market.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#144

Post by pelasaco » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 8:02 AM UTC

athriren wrote: post #123

pelasaco wrote: post #97

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.. Disclosure: I work for SUSE [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_Liang

Are you saying the upper management of SUSE is boring or the upper management of Rancher is boring? It’s unclear from the wording.

sorry at SUSE.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#145

Post by pelasaco » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 8:05 AM UTC

darren0 wrote: post #118

pelasaco wrote: post #97

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.. Disclosure: I work for SUSE [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_Liang

Acquihire 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

that'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!

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#146

Post by psankar » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 9:01 AM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #2

Another great product acquired by a mediocre behemoth. Here's hoping they can maintain enough independence to continue innovating.

Ex-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.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#147

Post by GordonS » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

zumachase wrote: post #83

vorpalhex wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you keep your TURN relays out of k8s?

Because we needed geographic distribution so that we don't end up hairpinning our users, and they only run a single service so the value prop is much lower. We use route 53 to do geodns across a number of cheap instances around the world (which is also nice, let's you pick regions with cheap bandwidth but good latency to major metro areas). We currently have TURN relays in Las Vegas, New York, and Amsterdam and that…

Really interested in hosting at Hetzner, as their prices are fantastic by comparison to AWS, Azure & GCP.

I'm particularly interested in what an HA Postgres setup might look like. Assuming you are running some kind of database (whether Postgres or otherwise), what are you doing for persistent storage? Are you using Hetzner's cloud block storage volumes? What is performance like?

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#148

Post by GordonS » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 9:24 AM UTC

bratao wrote: post #33

leonardteo wrote: post #3

Well 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.

One 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-k8... ) It really transformed my company DevOps. I´m VERY happy. If you can, use…

You mentioned somewhere that your servers were hosted with Hetzner - are you using their "cloud volume" block storage? Really curious to know what performance is like with this cloud attached SSD storage!

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#149

Post by mugsie » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

techntoke wrote: post #110

mugsie wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing nodes, helping repairing broken things, upgrading the control plane, upgrading etcd etc.

All easily done using Helm and kubeadm.

Some of that is easily done with Helm and kubeadm, but not all of it, and definitely doesn't scale as you grow the number and size of the clusters running.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#150

Post by acdha » Thu, Jul 09, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC

ofrzeta wrote: post #78

acdha wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenShift is expensive and requires a significant O&M investment. If you want to use standard tools it’d be nice to have a managed standard Kubernetes option without paying for a lot of complexity your teams don’t want.

It's also open source.

Yes, but then you’re still supporting the additional platform components. If you’re using those services, that’s reasonable but if you have other tools you might reasonably want something smaller which doesn’t require you to learn and support things which you aren’t using and which delay upstream k8s releases shipping.