SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs • Hacker News Board

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#51

Post by leonardteo » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

api wrote: post #41

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 thing that continuously irks me about K8S is that the bar is so high. Does it really need to be so complex? Does it really need so much mandatory complexity? Is that complexity needed or do more complex things actually tend to win in certain markets because nerds like knobs?

Actually K8S itself as a standard is not complex/hard. If you are a developer and user/consumer of K8S, use it! If the cluster is managed by someone else, K8S is great.

It only gets complex when you have to provision & manage your own clusters. That's where Rancher really shines, as it makes it so much simpler to deploy and manage K8s everywhere.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#52

Post by Legogris » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

omginternets wrote: post #18

mikepurvis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

Yup. 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.

I 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.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#53

Post by bg24 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

This is a good acquisition.

I was thinking that AWS would acquire Rancher to make inroads into multi-cloud and hybrid kubernetes.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#54

Post by necovek » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

bovermyer wrote: post #12

I'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.

I was actually a bit behind on the current SUSE ownership: last I remember was it getting acquired by Novell and entering into an agreement with Microsoft. I was thus confused by your comment.

For those like me, SUSE was sold off again in 2018 after like 5 acquisitions, and has been an "independent business unit" for a while now.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#55

Post by api » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

leonardteo wrote: post #51

api wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that continuously irks me about K8S is that the bar is so high. Does it really need to be so complex? Does it really need so much mandatory complexity? Is that complexity needed or do more complex things actually tend to win in certain markets because nerds like knobs?

Actually K8S itself as a standard is not complex/hard. If you are a developer and user/consumer of K8S, use it! If the cluster is managed by someone else, K8S is great. It only gets complex when you have to provision & manage your own clusters. That's where Rancher really shines, as it makes it so much simpler to deploy and manage K8s everywhere.

I place provisioning and management of your own clusters in a category I call "installability" or "deployability." It's a fundamental category of UX especially for technical and infrastructure applications.

I once tried to deploy a minimal test instance of OpenStack. Granted this was years ago, but I have been doing Linux since 1993 and I could not get it to run. That's an example of absolutely horrible UX at the deployability level.

K8S is nowhere near that bad but it definitely seems much harder than it needs to be to provision a basic default configuration for a working cluster.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#56

Post by dexcs » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

SEJeff wrote: post #8

maratc wrote: post #6

The real news for me here is that SUSE still exists.

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

Afaik one big reason for this is that SAP supports only Suse with on-prem installations.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#57

Post by aplanas » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:27 PM UTC

caymanjim wrote: post #2

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

I 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.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#58

Post by aplanas » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

necovek wrote: post #54

bovermyer wrote: post #12

I'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.

I was actually a bit behind on the current SUSE ownership: last I remember was it getting acquired by Novell and entering into an agreement with Microsoft. I was thus confused by your comment. For those like me, SUSE was sold off again in 2018 after like 5 acquisitions, and has been an "independent business unit" for a while now.

TL;DR: https://www.eqtgroup.com/Investments/Current-Portfolio/suse/

But we are mostly independent now. I.e we choose the directions.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#59

Post by tombh » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

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.

Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs

#60

Post by mugsie » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

api wrote: post #55

leonardteo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually K8S itself as a standard is not complex/hard. If you are a developer and user/consumer of K8S, use it! If the cluster is managed by someone else, K8S is great. It only gets complex when you have to provision & manage your own clusters. That's where Rancher really shines, as it makes it so much simpler to deploy and manage K8s everywhere.

I place provisioning and management of your own clusters in a category I call "installability" or "deployability." It's a fundamental category of UX especially for technical and infrastructure applications. I once tried to deploy a minimal test instance of OpenStack. Granted this was years ago, but I have been doing Linux since 1993 and I could not get it to run. That's an example of absolutely horrible UX at the dep…

K8S is a lot easier than OpenStack to install, but when comparing something like Rancher to OpenStack, it should be compared to something like OpenStack Ansible, or a vendor version of OpenStack (RIP HPE Helion) which were a lot easier than apt-get install openstack is.

K8S has a lot less moving parts - a couple of binaries / containers and etcd. The issue start coming up when you go beyond the single control plane node, and want a HA API.