SUSE CTO talks about OpenELA and keeping customer trust SUSE is serious about Linux in the enterprise, so much so that the veteran penguin-botherer is willing to risk the ire of Red Hat with OpenELA and the offer of CentOS support for users who just can't let go of the soon-to-be end-of-life operating system. Despite the company's efforts to show off updates made to Rancher, the …
We see it as a distraction, of which SUSE still has way too many (like Harvester HCI, a nice idea that started as a replacement for ESXi/vSphere and turned into a resource hogging monster that tries to do everything but nothing right). And it's not that SUSE's own products couldn't benefit from more attention. Rancher, while a great platform, is still some kind of a mess in many areas, and I would like to see more concrete plans for the next SLE version (which I believe is based on MicroOS?).
The fact that they are going private again also means the era of constant change at SUSE isn't over yet.
It's not uncommon for companies to have some limited workloads running on SLES or SLES 4 SAP, particularly stuff like SAP HANA clusters and the like and then to have some RHEL/Centos based systems for some other applications, maybe software that's certified for those CentOS platforms.
Getting rug-pulled on CentOS might prompt them to move to one of the OpenELA downstreams, or at least that's the theory. Only time will tell if that makes sense.
Pooling resources in this way could help share the costs, while each getting a shot at the market share benefits in their own way. Additionally, a lot of the fixed costs for maintaining the development and build tool chains are baked in and the tools are basically reusable.
My big question about all of this is ok, you can theoretically sign up to maintain a dying branch of code, but what about the documentation and other ancillary support? How is that going to be handled?
Problem with harvester and rancher can't run inside k8s cluster without full host privilege which defeats the whole "manage" without root access. And too resource hungry , with serious features behind the suse premium subscription , so many issues not addressed by suse or the open-source project.
Opensuse is right and the immutable OS direction gives lots of options but just base platform alone won't buy people into your ecosystem. Redhat did good with Openshift tied to coreOS and rhel9 with coreOS features. Everything else redhat is slowly burning to the ground. RHEV and RHOpenstack dead at redhat are terrible direction for the IBM-Redhat. Abandoning Redhat CloudformEngine all terrible bad bad decisions. Suspiciously like an IBM forced order to redhat product cullings.
As an IT Pro Side's comments about providing support for another 2-3 years to give IT time to think about the next move is spot on.
People may not be aware but as Sys Admins/IT Technicians we are silly busy keeping systems running, troubleshooting issues, supporting users, setting up hardware, managing shares, etc One doesn't often have the time to worry about replacing your entire server OS. And it's not a task we're keen to do because things will break.
Plus you'd be surprised how hard it is to get the board to actually spend any money on IT. We're often running on a shoestring budget. So when if your raise the issue early, by the time discussions are had, budgets are made etc years can pass.
There will be A LOT of IT taking advantage of Suse's extended support offerings, especially if they price it right.
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