2 Business aspect #
Agility is driving developers toward more cloud-native methodologies that focus on microservices architectures and streamlined workflows. Container technologies, like Kubernetes, embody this agile approach and help enable cloud-native transformation.
By unifying IT operations with Kubernetes, organizations realize key benefits like increased reliability, improved security and greater efficiencies with standardized automation. Therefore, Kubernetes infrastructure platforms are adopted by enterprises to deliver:
- Cluster Operations
Improved Production and DevOps efficiencies with simplified cluster usage and robust operations
- Security Policy & User Management
Consistent security policy enforcement plus advanced user management on any Kubernetes infrastructure
- Access to Shared Tools & Services
A high level of reliability with easy, consistent access to a broad set of tools and services
2.1 Business problem #
Many organizations are deploying Kubernetes clusters everywhere — in the cloud, on-premises, and at the edge — to unify IT operations. Such organizations can realize dramatic benefits, including:
Consistently deliver a high level of reliability on any infrastructure
Improve DevOps efficiency with standardized automation
Ensure enforcement of security policies on any infrastructure
However, simply relying on upstream Kubernetes alone can introduce extra overhead and risk because Kubernetes clusters are typically deployed:
Without central visibility
Without consistent security policies
And must be managed independently
Deploying a scalable kubernetes infrastructure requires consideration of a larger ecosystem, encompassing many software and infrastructure components and providers. Further, the ability to continually address the needs and concerns of:
- Developers
For those who focus on writing code to build their apps securely using a preferred workflow, providing a simple, push-button deployment mechanism of their containerized workloads where needed.
- IT Operators
General infrastructure requirements still rely upon traditional IT pillars are for the stacked, underlying infrastructure. Ease of deployment, availability, scalability, resiliency, performance, security and integrity are still core concerns to be addressed for administrative control and observability.
Beyond the core infrastructure software layers of managed Kubernetes clusters, organizations may be also be impacted by:
- Compute Platform
Potential inconsistencies and impacts of multiple target system platforms for the distributed deployments of the cluster elements, across:
physical, baremetal, hypervisors and virtual machines
2.2 Business value #
With Rancher Kubernetes Engine, the operation of Kubernetes is easily automated and entirely independent of the operating system and platform running. Using a supported version of the container runtime engine, one can deploy and run Kubernetes with Rancher Kubernetes Engine. It builds a cluster from a single command in a few minutes, and its declarative configuration makes Kubernetes upgrades atomic and safe.
By allowing operation teams to focus on infrastructure and developers to deploy code the way they want too, SUSE and the Rancher offerings helps bring products to market faster and accelerate an organization’s digital transformation.
SUSE Rancher is a fundamental part of the complete software stack for teams adopting containers. It provides DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads while also addressing the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across any targetedd infrastructure.
- Developers
SUSE Rancher makes it easy to securely deploy containerized applications no matter where the Kubernetes infrastructure runs -– in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. Using Helm or the App Catalog to deploy and manage applications across any or all these environments, ensuring multi-cluster consistency with a single deployment process.
- IT Operators
SUSE Rancher not only deploys and manages production-grade Kubernetes clusters from datacenter to cloud to the edge, it also unites them with centralized authentication, access control and observability. Further, it streamlines cluster deployment on bare metal or virtual machines and maintains them using defined security policies.
With this increased consistency of the managed Kubernetes infrastructure clusters, organizations benefit from an even higher level of the Cloud Native Computing model where each layer only relies upon the API and version of the adjacent layer, such as:
- Compute Platform
The above software application and technology solutions are used with the platforms utilizing Ampere Computing that provides the industry’s first cloud native processors. As the term implies, these compute platforms are built to host many containers that must adhere to strict service level agreement (SLA) requirements, uniquely delivering the performance, scalability, security and power efficiency that is focused on today’s hyperscale cloud and edge computing workloads and applications. Providing the highest total performance and performance per watt of power, these Ampere Arm-based processors deliver a sustainable server solution for data center applications and enabling cloud service providers to meet the compute demands of the future with only a fraction of the power and real estate consumed today.
High Performance
Ampere processor products are single-threaded, run at consistently high frequencies, and are built with large low-latency private caches. This results in predictable high performance that elastically scales in a linear fashion for all the cloud native applications built in containers and managed by Kubernetes. The architecture also lends itself to high utilization and delivers consistent performance under maximum load conditions.
Linear Scalability
Ampere cloud native processors add more and often get more of the same performance you got last time. In addition to being the leader in power efficiency, Ampere’s high performance cloud native processors contain up to 128 cores, by far the most in the industry. These cloud native processors were architected and designed from the ground up to deliver on the metrics that matter for modern cloud native applications including a level of rack scalability that allows a rack density of over 3000 cores yielding the best container density in the industry for micro-service based services orchestrated by cloud native tools like Kubernetes.
Predictability
Ampere aligns both the hardware and software to provide constant and consistent performance even under heavy load conditions.
Sustainability
Cloud Service Providers’ relentless drive to achieve carbon neutrality requires power efficient servers. Ampere’s extremely power efficient cores that deliver exceptional performance. Legacy processors fall short of meeting modern cloud compute requirements. In fact data centers built with Ampere Altra Max processors at scale can be up to 60% more efficient from a power consumption perspective for equivalent application performance needs.