Exploring SUSE Edge 3.0: What’s new?

The management of multiple Kubernetes clusters operating on diverse hardware in various locations presents significant obstacles. Edge computing is also complicated by factors such as limited connectivity, limited compute resources, energy consumption, and on-site expertise. SUSE Edge 3.0 is designed to enhance your Edge Computing strategy by providing better automation, offering high availability solutions, improved observability, and robust security. This article will delve into what’s new in SUSE Edge 3.0 and provide a comprehensive technical overview.

Open Source Foundations: Innovating with SUSE Edge 3.0

Open source is at the heart of everything we do at SUSE. It has been the foundation of major IT innovations over the past two decades and is essential for avoiding vendor lock-in, offering flexibility to adapt to business needs. With SUSE Edge 3.0, we extend Open Source Software and Edge Computing to be enterprise-ready, consumable, easy to implement and manage at scale.

Detailed Examination of SUSE Edge 3.0 stack

SUSE Edge 3.0 Stack

SUSE Edge 3.0 builds on a trusted stack of technologies like SLE Micro, Rancher Prime, and Kubernetes. For a better understanding of how SUSE Edge 3.0 works and its capabilities, let’s delve in the different components of the solution.

Rancher Prime offers a single pane of glass for the management of Kubernetes, including all the tooling necessary to manage multiple clusters at scale, including observability, logging, service Mesh, an application catalog and Fleet as a GitOps engine, enabling management as code not only for applications but also for clusters.

SUSE Manager and Elemental. This combination provides full lifecycle OS management to simplify administration tasks at the Edge and in the Cloud through. It also provides node-onboarding for Rancher, when a new node starts and registers against the endpoint running on Rancher and the node becomes available to deploy Kubernetes, facilitating remote onboarding and management of custom nodes.

Longhorn is a Cloud Native storage solution offering great performance in resource-constrained environments and flexible storage solutions for Edge environments.

NeuVector is a world-class container security solution that offers advanced solutions such as Supply Chain Security, Container Segmentation and layer 7 observability and scanning. NeuVector discovers normal connections and application container behavior and automatically builds a security policy to protect container-based services. NeuVector correlates application, network, process, and file access layers to assure you have the multi-vector accuracy needed for zero-trust.  

RKE2 and K3s, are  Kubernetes distributions based on Containerd runtime, lightweight and deployed using a single binary. K3s is designed for IoT environments and smaller devices like Raspberry Pi boards, offering a simplified entry point to Kubernetes. In contrast, RKE2 prioritizes security and aligns more closely with upstream Kubernetes. RKE2 comes with default configurations that meet the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark requirements and supports FIPS 140-2 compliance, offering a robust platform for organizations with stringent security needs. For these reasons, SUSE recommends RKE2 for enterprise customers and highly regulated industries.

SLE Micro is the foundation of our Edge solution. Based on SUSE Linux Enterprise technology, it is immutable and transactional, making it perfect for deployments at the Edge. It is secure, offers a smaller attack surface and is compliant with multiple security standards, such as FIPS 140-2, DISA SRG/STIG and CIS.

The combination of these technologies offers a solid foundation to manage Kubernetes, applications and Linux running on different hardware or IaaS platforms at scale. SUSE Edge 3.0 is a horizontal platform that provides all the different tools needed to cover the multiple use cases and situations that the different verticals or businesses will find at the Edge, from IoT devices to small regional data centers. Furthermore, SUSE Edge 3.0 has a low footprint making it energy-efficient  and a good match for both business and environment.

Features and enhancements in SUSE Edge 3.0

All new features and components in SUSE Edge 3.0 aim to improve management and security, either by optimizing the stack or providing validated designs for Edge deployments. They also aim to improve HA capabilities or extend Kubernetes’ value at the Edge.

• Edge Image Builder: EIB automates the creation of complete OS images for edge deployments, streamlining the setup from the operating system to Kubernetes using just a configuration file. With automated, code-based deployment strategies, including GitOps, you can improve your edge security and reduce misconfigurations.
• Rancher CAPI Integration and Metal3 Infrastructure Provider: Provides automated provisioning on bare metal, enhancing your edge infrastructure with SLE Micro & RKE2. This provisioning system needs servers with a BMC to work. This is one of the provisioning solutions that SUSE Edge offers. 
• MetalLB Support: Solves the lack of Kubernetes native network load balancers for bare-metal clusters, ensuring functionality across non-IaaS platforms.
• SUSE Edge Stack Validation, will help our customers to rest assured that deploying SUSE Edge 3.0 following our recommendations will cover their use cases, it will help to avoid troubles and misconfigurations helping them to be successful at the Edge.
• Fully Air-gapped and connected support, to help our customers adapt to the different situations at the Edge.

Additional Features

• Akri for Industrial IoT Management: Akri detects heterogeneous leaf devices, such as IP cameras and USB devices, adding them as resources within a Kubernetes cluster, along with embedded hardware resources such as GPUs and FPGAs. Enabling a common way to manage IoT devices from Kubernetes. [Tech Preview]
• Two-node HA with Synadia NATS [Tech Preview]
• Mesh Expansion with Buoyant Linkerd
• Multi-Rancher Edge Visibility UI: New implementation using an extension to have visual information of all your managed clusters, their location, and state from a single UI. [Tech Preview]

SUSE Edge 3.0 Benefits at the Edge

The enhancements in SUSE Edge 3.0 are designed to simplify the management of large-scale, distributed Edge environments. They provide reliable, scalable solutions that reduce the complexity of deployments and ensure high availability across your network. As Edge computing continues to evolve, SUSE remains committed to innovation, ensuring our solutions meet your most demanding requirements.

Read more about SUSE Edge:

• SUSE Releases Edge 3.0: Highly Validated Edge Optimized Stack
• What’s new in SUSE ATIP 3.0?
• Documentation

Come visit us at:

• SUSECON 2024 in Berlin, June 17-19.
• Kubecon NA 2024 in Salt Lake City, November 12–15.