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?
SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
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Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> mostly independent
Sounds like something Red Hat could say too...
Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would Red Hat (who created OpenShift) want to buy an inferior competitor?
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.
> If you want to use standard tools it’d be nice to have a managed standard Kubernetes option
What standard tool doesn't work on OpenShift? It's certified to have 100% compatibility with Kubernetes, it just adds stuff, doesn't it?
Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#64Well 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?
You can use Docker Swarm. Mirantis since back-paddled on its plans to deprecate it. It's a great piece of SW if you don't need thousands of containers, but rather low hundreds (and if you don't need additional stuff like Istio, operators, etc.)
Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#65Makes 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.
How 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 K…
I 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.
Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#66Curious 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.
Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
Why not compare it to a instead to a contemporary competitor - Nomad - which has simplicity as a core value? It has _far_ fewer moving parts than Kubernetes.
Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
TL;DR: https://www.eqtgroup.com/Investments/Current-Portfolio/suse/ But we are mostly independent now. I.e we choose the directions.
> mostly independent Sounds like something Red Hat could say too...
SUSE's owner (EQT) is not doing anything in the IT sector themselves, unlike RedHat's owner (IBM).
Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
TL;DR: https://www.eqtgroup.com/Investments/Current-Portfolio/suse/ But we are mostly independent now. I.e we choose the directions.
> mostly independent Sounds like something Red Hat could say too...
With RH/IBM IBM certainly wants to leverage the RH brand and separate it a bit from the IBM brand, while leveraging customers and technologies across the company.
Suse's current owner won't have much synergies between Suse and their real estate business (except that Suse probably rents office space there) You don't do deals like "rent an apartment, get a Suse license for free" Thus Suse, under obersight can likely set their business strategy and objectives more freely.
Re: SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs
#70The real news for me here is that SUSE still exists.
Aren't they 2nd place after Red Hat? I'm talking about distributions that are made for enterprises.
I heard for example that Intel was/is a huge user and used it on their computing farm.