Great things come in pairs. Most of us will agree that food is good. Many of us also believe that wine is good. However, the pairing of the right food with the right wine clearly results in a fusion of flavors greater than the sum of its parts. If you pair the right things together, magic happens.
Now part of Linux titan SUSE, Rancher has been a thought leader in containerization, and later Kubernetes, since the earliest days of Docker. This long history with containers and orchestration has enabled Rancher to carve out a successful place in a highly competitive market, propelled by a tight focus on adding value beyond “just the distro” or flavor of K8s being deployed.
Recently, Shannon Williams, SUSE CRO, and co-founder of Rancher, was a guest on the EnterpriseReady Podcast, hosted by Grant Miller, CEO of Replicated. During that conversation, it became clear that these companies are aligned in their vision for the market and that these two platforms are, in fact, highly complementary.
Rancher serves the diverse needs of the broader Kubernetes market for teams seeking K8s deployment and management in a secure, scalable manner. Rancher has solutions for everything from deploying and managing fleets of lightweight edge devices running k3s to deploying and managing the lifecycle of multiple air gapped RKE2 clusters with 1000s of nodes across multiple data centers or cloud providers. SUSE, of course, brings a long history of serving the ISV market, going back to the early days of Linux OS support. With SUSE, Rancher now delivers its complete platform vision to ISVs and the enterprise K8s market.
Replicated has also been working with Containers and Orchestration since the early days of Docker. However, Replicated is singularly focused on serving the needs of Enterprise ISVs that require the packaging and distribution of their licensed 3rd-Party Kubernetes applications. Replicated itself is not a distro provider, nor do we provide any level of Linux OS support. While Kubernetes adoption continues to accelerate, there are still far more 3rd-party enterprise software teams building on K8s than end users who already have a mature enough infrastructure to host these applications.
As a result, many instances of these 3rd-party apps are delivered with an “Embedded” K8s cluster that is deployed as part of the application installation to create a ‘software appliance.’ That appliance could be running everything on a single physical or virtual host, or it could be configured as a fully HA, multi-node cluster. Today, over 100 top enterprise software companies utilize Replicated to power their self-hosted, multi-prem applications. Companies like HashiCorp, Puppet, Automation Anywhere, CircleCI, and more, rely on Replicated to control everything from the Day 1 installation process to the Day 2 management experience of maintaining, updating, and troubleshooting their enterprise applications.
Today, we are excited to announce that Replicated has joined the SUSE One Partner Program recognizing the natural partnership already forming organically in the market. By joining together to support ISVs with the ability to package and distribute their applications with Replicated and a Rancher platform, we can power the next generation of 3rd-party enterprise software and deliver a fantastic customer experience for both the ISV and their end-users.
We are thrilled to embark on this journey together, and we invite the Rancher community to learn more by scheduling a demo today.