Rancher Wrap: Another Year of Innovation and Growth

2022 was another year of innovation and growth for SUSE’s Enterprise Container Management business. We introduced significant upgrades to our Rancher and NeuVector products, launched new open source projects and matured others. Exiting 2022, Rancher remains the industry’s most widely adopted container management platform and SUSE remains the preferred vendor for enabling enterprise cloud native transformation. Here’s a quick look at a few key themes from 2022.  

Security Takes Center Stage 

As the container management market matured in 2022, container security took center stage.  Customers and the open source community alike voiced concerns around the risks posed by their increasing reliance on hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, and edge infrastructure. Beginning with the open sourcing of NeuVector, which we acquired in Q4 2021, in 2022 we continued to meet our customers’ most stringent security and assurance requirements, making strategic investments across our portfolio, including:  

• Kubewarden – In June, we donated Kubewarden to the CNCF. Now a CNCF sandbox project, Kubewarden is an open source policy engine for Kubernetes that automates the management and governance of policies across Kubernetes clusters thereby reducing risk.  It also simplifies the management of policies by enabling users to integrate policy management into their CI/CD engines and existing infrastructure.  
• SUSE NeuVector 5.1 – In November, we released SUSE Neuvector 5.1, further strengthening our already industry leading container security platform. 
• Rancher Prime– Most recently, we introduced Rancher Prime, our new commercial offering, replacing SUSE Rancher.  Supporting our focus on security assurances, Rancher Prime offers customers the option of accessing their Rancher Prime software directly from a trusted private registry. Additionally, Rancher Prime FIPS-140-3 and SLSA Level 2 and 3 certifications will be finalized in 2023.

Open Source Continues to Fuel Innovation 

 Our innovation did not stop at security. In 2022, we also introduced new projects and matured others, including:  

• Elemental – Fit for Edge deployments, Elemental is an open source project, that enables centralized management and operations of RKE2 and K3s clusters when deployed with Rancher. 
• Harvester – SUSE’s open-source cloud-native hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) alternative to proprietary HCI is now utilized across more than 710+ active clusters. 
• Longhorn – now a CNCF incubator project, Longhorn is deployed across more than 72,000 nodes. 
• K3s – SUSE’s lightweight Kubernetes distribution designed for the edge which we donated to the CNCF, has surpassed 4 million downloads. 
• Rancher Desktop – SUSE’s desktop-based container development environment for Windows, macOS, and Linux environments has surpassed 520,000 downloads and 4,000 GitHub stars since its January release. 
• Epinio – SUSE’s Kubernetes-powered application development platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution in which users you can deploy apps without setting up infrastructure yourself has surpassed 4,000 downloads and 300 stars on GitHub since its introduction in September. 
• Opni – SUSE’s multi-cluster observability tool (including logging, monitoring and alerting) with AIOps has seen steady growth with over 75+ active deployments this year.  

 As we head into 2023, Gartner research indicates the container management market will grow ~25% CAGR to $1.4B in 2025. In that same time-period, 85% of large enterprises will have adopted container management solutions, up from 30% in 2022.  SUSE’s 30-year heritage in delivering enterprise infrastructure solutions combined with our market leading container management solutions uniquely position SUSE as the vendor of choice for helping organizations on their cloud native transformation journeys.  I can’t wait to see what 2023 holds in store!