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Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

I really liked the idea or RancherOS, but somehow it never quite lived up to its promise. In particular, the need to distinguish between root and non-root containers was surprisingly confusing in practice. It effectively broke the promise of “just worry about docker”.

Has anyone here adopted it over the long term? What made it stick?

Any ideas why SUSE would need/want this?

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> Any ideas why SUSE would need/want this?

Momentum and credibility in Kubernetes land. Rancher has more of it. SUSE has a lot of experience in Kubernetes but hasn't gotten much credit for it or, I am guessing, many sales from it.

Disclosure: I work for VMware.

I tried it briefly for homelab use and came to the same conclusion— I ended up feeling like I had a lot more of a safety net with a conventional Ubuntu/Docker/Portainer type setup than I did with Rancher.

Yup. I should have specified that mine was a homelab setup as well (and was several years ago).

It’s a shame because I still feel there’s a gap between docker-compose and Kubernetes. I don’t have k8-size problems, but I do have well-beyond-docker-compose-size problems.

Docker Swarm fills that gap pretty well in my experience. The best part is that it's an almost trivial migration to move from Compose to Swarm. Swarm to K8s is not so easy, even with tools like kompose.

I can vouch for Nomad, coupled with Consul and Vault. You can start simple, it scales well and with the recent and undergoing integrations with Consul Connect and Nomad you can go service mesh with mTLS if you want.

Not sure about RancherOS and how much it factored into the sale. It could end up merged/transitioned into some Suse-container OS offering

The enterprise K8S business is compelling, especially all the shops using metal/on-prem. I settled on using Rancher and RKE for production clusters just because it was the simplest way to get HA clusters up within minutes without a PhD in K8S.

But I think a lot of the work they are doing on the other parts of K8S are really interesting: K3S, for example, could become very popular for running on IoT and ARM. K3S really put a smile on my face. You just run it and boom, you have a K8S cluster.

SUSE already has a container offering, CaaS Platform:

https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/

(Source: I worked on the documentation for v3.)

The partly-SUSE-sponsored openSUSE Project also has a container-centric distro, Kubic MicroOS:

https://kubic.opensuse.org/

So it is already active in this area, and yes, I agree, there's a good chance that RancherOS will end up merging or even replacing this.

K3S is nice but I have found microK8s to be even easier to get setup and configured for the IoT and small ARM server cluster scenarios.

SUSE just bought a golden ticket into the upper echelons of the CNCF. Rancher is also very profitable, way more than their kube offering.

I think everyone and their dog is realizing that there isn't all that much money in the traditional OS business anymore, and are betting on cloud platforms of one kind or another.

Redhat invested quite a bit into openshift, IBM bought them (and mentioned Redhat's cloud strategy in the announcement as one of the major reasons).

Microsoft is doubling down on Azure, now SUSE wants a piece of the pie.

I'm not familiar enough with Rancher to tell you why those chose exactly them, but they had to do something.

> I think everyone and their dog is realizing that there isn't all that much money in the traditional OS business anymore

I wish my dog was as smart as yours, he continues to pay for windos and runs IE since no one on the internet knows he's a dog

RedHat has Openshift, now SUSE has Rancher.

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