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Comment by trpc | Hacker News Reader

what does SUSE even do in the age of kubernetes?

They work on the core container engine stuff. Aleksa Sarai (who posts in here every once in a while as "cyphar") is the maintainer of runC, which is core to most popular container runtimes (containerd/docker, podman, cri-o/kubernetes, etc.).

They also work on building a platform for trivially deploying and scaling Kubernetes within openSUSE as Kubic[1]. SUSE has a variant of this as the SUSE CaaS platform[2] ("container as a service" platform) product. Kubic is analogous to Fedora CoreOS[3], while CaaSP is similar to RHEL CoreOS that's part of OpenShift[4].

[1]: https://kubic.opensuse.org/

[2]: https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/

[3]: https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/

[4]: https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-4-install-experience/

thank you, never heard of Kubic until now

In addition to all of the container work we do, we also still maintain a distribution and do a tonne of upstream work. While people seem to have forgotten about the purpose of distributions with the whole container thing, they still provide a few things:

* Continued upstream development of core system software.

* A host system that is stable and up-to-date (which you need to run your container manager).

* Container images which have up-to-date software, timely security patches, and reasonable security policies.

Distributions are the only members of the ecosystem which actually solve these problems in any meaningful way. It's a shame that we seem to be boring (or even vestigial) at this point despite all of this new software still requiring our work in order to actually run.

Richard Brown gave two talks at FOSDEM 2019 about Kubic, as well:

https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/speaker/richard_brown/

Sorry but your comment reveals more about the filter bubble you (or maybe we all actually) are in than reality.

While I haven't used Suse for a while in personal projects, Suse is basically the only alternative to Red Hat enterprises have for running Linux with support for 10 years or more from a company deeply involved in kernel development. A pen testing study recently (can't find the link atm) reported that only RHEL and SLES had properly setup ASLR, selinux/AppArmor and other security features.

When Red Hat is fully absorbed into IBM, there might be many customers not willing to make deals with IBM, so I'm guessing the investor sees serious growth for Suse's enterprise support business.

Now if only they shipped a distro without systemd and more POSIXly ...

You do realize that "cloud" doesn't mean the services are running in water vapour up in the sky, right? There are real computers with real operating systems running beneath all those trendy virtualization concepts.

One of those operating systems is SUSE Linux.

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