Exploring the SUSE and AWS Partnership | AWS re:Invent 2025

Hey everyone, it's Alan Hummel. We're back here with our continuing live coverage of AWS Reinvent 2025, um, another month. We won't be saying 2025.

It's hard to believe. But anyway, it's day two. We've been having a great time interviewing some really great folks here.

This is a, a, this is probably the biggest panel we've done so far this week, and I'm really excited to introduce you to them. Uh, I'm going to ask actually, folks to introduce themselves so I don't mess up names and everything, but we'll start at the far right with Ali. Yeah.

My name is Ali Reese, and I'm VP of Product Strategy at suse Ali. Thank you. And thanks for being here with me.

Next to Ali is Mani. I'm Mani Jata. I'm man Strategic Alliances at AWS Mani.

Thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. And this young lady is Christine Cio, Christine eo, and I'm VP of our AWS Growth Strategy at suse.

I love it. So I think just the fact that we have someone who's in charge of the AWS growth strategy at SUSE is a statement about how you view your relationship with AWS. Correct, yeah.

Especially a senior person. So, um, we're gonna dive into that. Uh, good.

I'm, I hope we do. Absolutely. Um, but Monty, if it's okay, I'd like to start with you.

It's a great title. You deal with a lot of the Linux providers, right? And, and look, we all know Linux, it's open source.

There's, there's some great companies in the Linux space. Sus is one of them. Um, what, what is AWS want from their Linux partners?

So, great. Uh, question Alan. Uh, let me start with where this journey started, right?

Like SUSE and, uh, AWS have been partnering for more than a decade, right? For context. Uh, one of the first Army listings on the AWS marketplace back in the day, 10 years ago, was suse, right?

Like we started there. So from there, this journey has grown. So to answer your question about, hey, like how do AWS and SUSE add value to each other?

I feel like we've grown the partnership from day one, right? Like we've added value to each other from a open source perspective, right? Like AWS has leaned on SUSE for so many, so many big initiatives, which we'll dive into.

So, um, really excited to be here to talk about all the work we are doing today. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Um, Christina, I'm gonna ask you, how do you know, obviously it's a strategic relationship to Souse. How do you view this? And not just you, but how does Souse look at this relationship?

Why is it strategic? How is it strategic? You know, I'm not even ready to jump into product or re announcements that we've done here this week, but historically, that strategic relationship, Well, going back to what Mony said, it's a a very strong relationship.

It's been there for 15 years. I joined the company actually as a consultant. Um, and that was in April of 23.

And at that time, they were just looking to get Marketplace off the ground. And I was working with the product teams and the engineering teams, and also sales. And it became very evident of the flexibility that AWS brought to the table in order to get a company like suse, who is now taking the products that they had that were traditionally on-prem and how we were going to deliver them through marketplace.

We had our, what we call first party, which is more like a, an omni based model that Monty talked about. But we had to look at how are we looking at operations? How are we looking at the way that we, um, stood up our listings and all that.

And I think from then in working with AWS, they provided the most flexibility to meet suse where they're at, at that point in time. And about a few months later, I was hired in as the VP of Cloud and then managed the, uh, global cloud team. And then we started looking at where the investments were being made within the partnership, who was really making and leaning into that investment.

And hands down it was AWS So, um, working with our executive team, um, they said, we really wanna double down on AWS and said, Christine, we would like you to go do that. So I started working with, um, our office of the CEO and our strategy office, and started putting down what that longer vision would be with AWS. And there were a couple things that we were working on at the time, um, that we just announced, which was, um, SUSE providing, um, additional packages in Amazon Linux.

One thing I really love about the company is choice and flexibility and customers are gonna use of, uh, various amounts of different technology. And SUSE's very, very open to supporting that. So we, we doubled down on that, uh, project.

And then we said, well, what if, what if we took, um, our rancher platform and we looked at in providing a SaaS? And then, um, Ollie came in and helped me really shape and define, uh, how that would look. And a year later, here we are.

So from a strategy perspective, you know, AWS has been, uh, a leader in the market, period, hands down. And yeah, with marketplace, they have just innovated and, and the amount of innovation that they do that we will never be able to, to do that on our own. And that was another reason why we really wanted to partner with somebody who had that depth and that breadth in the market.

And we had the technology on the other hand. So it just became a really nice union. I love it.

So you mentioned there's a lot packed in, there is a lot, no pun intended. We had to unpack it starting maybe with sp the, the secure packet for Amazon packages for Amazon Linux. Spoke a little bit about that actually, uh, earlier with, with Margaret.

Mm-hmm. But Ali, you are the, you are the product guy. What are we talking about here?

So, from a product perspective, what I'm really excited about is like the launch, um, that we've pulled off together with the help from Amazon for suse, rancher for AWS, um, that's been the products in conception and like being developed for over a year. We've done a lot of user research and know, had a lot of good help from, from our friends and partners at AWS understanding what it means to be a product led strategy. Um, you know, how we operationalize SaaS products.

'cause if you think of what SUSE's been doing, right? Like we're SaaS is not necessarily in our DNA yet. If you look back at what we were doing.

And so like that, that modernization right, is super exciting for me personally, um, to help bring this to the company. And, you know, I couldn't have done it without the help from AWS. Um, and so the product in itself is Rancher is our multi-cloud, multi cluster Kubernetes management platform, right?

And, um, SUSE acquired it five years or so ago, and we've, um, have tremendous success. It's highly regarded. We're Garner and, uh, forest a leader, you know, in multi-cloud, uh, multi-class management.

Um, but it's, that's an on-prem product, and that fits our traditional customer profile of enterprise customers where they like to just have, you know, things on their estate. Um, but, you know, we want to, you know, using some of the AWS technology meeting customers where they are and meeting new customers. And so with, um, Rancho for AWS we're actually tapping into, um, customer profiles that are EKS users, right?

And there's, there's plenty of them. EKS as well is successful. It's a great platform, um, for, for any Kubernetes, um, workloads.

Sure. Um, and so what we are doing is we're bringing the capabilities from rancher to EKS to their customers. And one of the feedback that we've heard is that, um, for example, multi-class management, if you have larger state, you know that that's where customers, um, wish they had additional help.

And this is one of the strengths of, of Rancher. Mm-hmm. Um, where we have heterogeneity and we support, you know, many clusters across many, um, providers.

Now being a AWS and EKS or Opinioned product, we've then taken, um, rancher and, and really added additional user experience to it. So, for example, um, identity management is often a problem, you know, for, for enterprises. 'cause there's multiple accounts and different setups and orgs.

And, you know, IAM is just, it's very complex because it's a very important topic. And so we take this very serious, but we've implemented features that make it really easy for our customers of SUSE Ranch of AWS to import identities in a safe way by delegating roles so there's no more copy and pasting of passwords and whatnot. So we do this all through off delegation, um, on the IAM side.

And then with, with that in mind, then we all of a sudden have insights into the whole estate that is being managed or run on EKS. And from there on we, um, allow our customers to selectively import specific clusters or all of them create new clusters and use the capabilities that Rancher Manager provides. And then, um, another part of the portfolio that we've baked into Suse Rancher for AWS is observability.

That's super critical, right? Like, we need to know and understand what's running, where, you know, how well it is performing are the bottlenecks. And so that, that's another key feature that's available in suse Ranch of for AWS.

Love it. Alan, if I may add to what, uh, Ollie is saying, I think this has been a long time in the making, right? Like, we meet the customers where they are.

So AWS customers and rancher customers, uh, have been using both products separately, right? Like, and for us to basically complete the puzzle by saying, Hey, you have a one-stop shop, go to the marketplace. You know, you get observability, you get cost optimization, all of that in one package.

Uh, I think that's a huge value add for customers. And it's, it's, uh, it's a long time in the making. Yeah.

Because customers have asked for it, And we have a, wait, there's one more. Um, so in, so this is just getting out the basic product, right? And then super exciting.

Everybody's talking about AI here, right? You can't walk across the floor, Not here, everywhere, but Billboard, it's, it's very, um, omnipresent, right? And, and so with the help from, from, um, the AWS teams, we've been able to actually implement one of the first, um, AI agents in the platform, um, within suse within our portfolio to help customers actually ease their SRE burden, right?

So Kubernetes is complex. Um, rancher helps already like to, to lower that complexity and make it more accessible. But now all of a sudden you have a, um, a wingman that helps you understand, you know, what a specific error code or whatever means, and you can actually chat with the system to identify, you know, is this intrinsic?

Is this a invasive problem? What are remediation steps? And we've built this on top of Bedrock and q and the, the way to get there was amazing.

And like, the value that it's providing for customers is really astounding. It, it really is. Again, a lot, a lot of stuff covered there.

Ali. Let, let's, you know, rancher, I, I'm angling the founder of Rancher. Mm-hmm.

It was, I'd know him, he's a friend. I know him for many years. Rancher in my mind, was the best multi cluster Kubernetes manager that in the market, right?

I mean, and look, I, you, you, you could go out onto the floor here at AWS reinvent and say, how many of you think Kubernetes management is easy? No one's raising their hands. Right?

It, it's a known thing. This is hard. Yeah.

Multi cluster Kubernetes management is even harder. And that's what made Rancher, or one of the things that made Rancher is, is unique as it was. And of course, since it's become part of the Sousa family, you know, the K threes and everything else, we, we added into it.

And now AI and, and what that means to it is, has, has made a a huge difference. I should mention when we say multi cluster, don't be confused with multi-cloud. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Right? It doesn't necessarily mean you're on different clouds, though.

We can, what happens is at the enterprise level, right, the average enterprise is running multiple clusters of Kubernetes, right? I don't know if mon if you would have metrics on that, but, Uh, more than metrics, I feel like the customer journey, right? Like they start with a few clusters and very quickly it expands across regions, across accounts.

So the complexity increases so quickly that something like rancher is super critical, uh, for somebody to scale, right? Like for an enterprise customer to scale that happens, that ramp happens very quickly. To your point.

Absolutely. Now, I just wanna make sure I got it straight. For the people watching this offering with AWS is a SaaS based offering, SaaS based offering, and it's focusing on AWS and DAWS ecosystem and EKS specifically.

So as a customer, you won't be able to manage, um, Azure or GCP for example, at this point, because we're targeting, um, that segment of customers that are getting started in, in EKS that are, you know, seeing the increasing complexity. And this is just single cloud strategy at this point, right? But as, as those customers mature, right?

Like, then we might see a multi-cloud strategy, you know, in, in enterprises. Yeah. Um, but for right now, this is, you know, we're focusing on EKS.

I love it. I want to come back. So I'm a security guy at heart.

I've been in security, I was in security a very long time. I didn't want to tell you how long, but we, we didn't call it cyber, I'll tell you that. Um, secure packages for Amazon Linux.

I want to come back to this. This is a major thing, right? We've seen over the last month or two, uh, you know, the NPM shy ude, the, the worm self propagating malware into packages.

It's a problem, right? When, when, when 80% of the software inside of the applications we develop are preexisting components, scripts, packages that we download in, gets into our software supply chain, and then God knows what happens. It's important and increasingly important that we know that we have confidence.

If I'm on Amazon and I'm getting a package from an Amazon partner or a repo, I wanna know that that's not, I'm not downloading malware. I'm not injecting malware into my thing. And that is, you know, SUSE announced this, I guess it was at Seuss Con last year, I think Ali, we might have spoken.

Mm-hmm. Um, there. And that's an important thing, right?

Yes. We have SBOs, right? That's, everybody wants to know, you know, bill of materials.

That's great. It's like the tag on your mattress, right? That you don't tear off.

It's good to have there, but we, we wanna have confidence in the packages we're putting into play that they're secure. And that's an important piece of this. It is important.

And I think, you know, just even going back to, we talked about complexity. We're talking about security, um, and we, we, we, um, kind of touched upon the voice of the customer. This, this whole solution started as a concept.

It was a concept document. And we actually talked to over 50 customers. The number one and number two, uh, issue that we were solving for was complexity security.

Yeah. Those are the top two. Uh, we see it too.

I mean, you know, we see it across the board. That's what people are concerned about. And when, and when we did that research, it actually kind of parlayed a little bit into what we were doing with Sal, the supplemental packages.

Yeah. Because now AWS can offer their customers a safe environment to create applications without having to pick their own packages that they need. It's all built in that repository.

And that's what's really critical. And that does leak into cluster management and everything else, containerizing applications. But It's a, it's a question of confidence.

Mm-hmm. I, I need to be confident that the software I'm getting from you is, is, is secure that it's not gonna come back to bite me, right? Because this is where, this is where incidents are happening.

Third party components into the software supply chain. Um, and if we're, and if developers are our audience, that's very much on top, as you say, it's on top of their minds. One of the top two that and complexity.

Um, if you don't mind, I'd like to come back a little to ai. We touched on it a bit. Certainly this show is all about ai, right?

AWS has re has come out guns blazing, right? About Agentic. And it was started with the keynote yesterday, right?

Mag Agentic AI developing their own ai, developing their own AI processors, right? The creating an AI stack, that's really what we're talking about, right? From hardware to software.

I know AI is something I've spoken to suer about over the last months year. How, how is that manifesting itself in these announcements and partnerships that we've made this week? This, well, we did sign a strategic collaboration agreement, and that really was the first kind of thinking of us leaning into the technology that AWS has.

And as Ollie pointed out earlier, we in incorporated that into the platform itself. Yes. Into the SaaS platform.

Um, that's our first step. And we actually are looking at it right now of looking at what we're doing around MCP and seeing how we can actually make the correlation between Amazon q, um, to look at how do we, how do we incorporate these two technologies? 'cause right now Q is predominantly for SaaS.

Yes. Not necessarily on-prem, but there's a lot of data there that actually is beneficial, um, for AWS customers as well. Sure.

Is. So we're, so we're in the infancy of that. So it's kind of, it, we, we signed the strategic agreement really thinking that, okay, we're gonna be using it for this, for this SaaS platform.

And then as we started deepening the relationship, other product teams, and you'll talk to Rick. I don't know if you've talked to Rick already. No, I have not.

Uh, you, you'll talk to him I think later today. Yes. And he'll tell you a little bit about SLES 16 and all of the, um, all the press and news that we're getting about the operating system because of all the work that we're doing around ai.

And he's looking at incorporating that into the platform as well. So it's, uh, and, and we've done our own, we have our own stack, um, for ai. And so does, so does, um, suse rancher.

Um, and so we're just now trying to look at how do we marry these, both these worlds. Let's talk suse rancher's, AI stack a little bit, Ali. So we in, in suse rancher for AWS, right?

We have, um, our agent that I, that I mentioned, right? Um, build on Bedrock and q and that helps from an SAE perspective. Um, but then if you think about it like being the infrastructure for workloads, right?

Like there's a lot of intelligence that we actually get through the observability solution, right? Like, so that helps feed and make agents and AI smarter about the, the infrastructure that, that we're operating. Um, but oftentimes there's, um, not just a Kubernetes estate.

And so going back to what Christine said, our, one of our, our products is, um, multi Linux manager, right? And so all of a sudden now when we have systems that can talk to each other in intelligently, um, right? Like, it helps enterprises, it helps customers to better understand their whole estate, not just compartmentalized, you know, by, by the execution platform that's Kubernetes or VMs or whatever.

And so I think that's the true power, like getting all those different data sources in and then combining them to, for, you know, to provide meaningful outcome. And, um, on the rancher side, we have, um, the stack that Christine mentioned earlier. Um, it's called suse ai.

Um, and that helps customers to securely run AI LLMs models and whatnot on-prem, right? Because there's a lot of risk right now that we have to manage, um, you know, with this new technology, uh, in terms of IP and like being, making sure that no data leaks and that models are not tampered with or that we don't have drift and suse, I helps customers actually to manage that complexity and those risk factors. Love it.

Nancy, I want to, from the AWS perspective, you guys have been sort of like the Candyman this week announcing all of these great gifts for, for developers and for partners like Cuse to develop on and build on top of expectations of, you know, Ali mentioned QI didn't hear a lot about Q this year, a lot more last year, I think. Hmm. But we've heard about, about Bedrock, but we've, we've heard about other, uh, agentic AI programs that a, uh, that, uh, AWS is, is working on it.

We're they're either in pre-release or they're released already, but, you know, imminent. What's the, you know, this thing is moving so fast. What's the timeframe you got a company like suse?

Is it gonna be next year that we're using, you know, some of the stuff that we're, we're doing? That's A great question, Alan. Um, you know, for instance, I'd love to talk about the mental model around how we build with partners like suse, especially from an AI perspective.

So Ollie, you can vouch for this, right? Like integrating q the agent into, uh, the suse rancher solution, I think it takes a matter of a few days mm-hmm. Versus what it would take earlier, a few months, right?

Like for the teams to come together, say, let's go innovate, right? Like figure out the architecture now that's out of the window, right? Like we say we are doing this, and then it happens within days.

And then to your question, where is this heading? I would say the days will be cut down into, right, like a few hours, right? Like that's the speed at which we are moving.

And that is, uh, we are seeing the benefits of that across the organization, right? Like from an efficiency perspective, uh, across the board, right? Like, this is the model we follow with all the partners.

We jointly say, Hey, these are the three customer problems we're trying to solve jointly. How can we insert all the AI innovation we are building at the services team, right? And then we kind of figure out how do, are we solving a real customer problem through this, right?

Like, what is the use case? That way it becomes very easy to scale. And that's how we solve for, uh, you know, a lot of the problems that, uh, suse is atan.

I think the, the length of time there for us to get this out was a few things, right? Understanding the customer, looking at a concept document, soliciting that. Then we actually had, um, folks from AWS come in and do a workshop about how to look at personas in a different way.

We were tapping into different personas, a developer persona, right? We we're used to the more of the platform engineer, but how are we going to tailor this offering to a developer, right? So that took some time.

Then we went to, um, work with the PLG team, um, with AWS so getting it, getting the product in a MVP stage. And now we're looking at how do we get better with automation through marketplace. That's another, that's kind of the next, but now that we have this baseline for the offering, it helps us now go back in and just now, you know, incorporate newer technologies or get, get a more, uh, feature rich roadmap moving forward.

So to the bottom of your question, like time to market mm-hmm. And time to adopt. Um, there's been a lot of ments around quick and quick suite, right?

Yes. Yeah. You've been in conversations with the teams already for months.

Um, and you know, that's something that we have on the roadmap. 'cause that helps, you know, having a in place in product chat bot is, is fine, but it's table stakes these days, right? Yes, it is.

Um, but like lifting this to the next level where, you know, you have agents facilitated through quick Suite, like talk to each other and actually automate business processes, right? Even down to the infrastructure. Like that's, I think where a lot of innovation can happen.

And I'm confident we'll be able to really quickly adopt that with the help from our AWS counterparts. Absolutely. Um, I wanna make sure if we hit anything I've left out announcement wise, It's on marketplace trial is there, and, uh, just a little plug there.

Okay, well, no. Hey, this is the place to do it. Checking out our marketplace.

Let me ask this then. What's next here? Vacation.

No, no, but I, you and me both, but actually it's gonna be almost crispy. But, um, no, but in terms of a strategic relationship, where do you see, let's ask the AWS point of view where, you know, where, where can, where's this headed? So going back to the journey where we started, we started with army based products.

Now, uh, to Christine and Ollie's Point, we are almost experts at SaaS building SaaS. So now the next transition is right, like we scale, right? Like, that's why we see our, uh, I think 2026 is gonna be the inflection point where the, uh, the SSA AWS uh, you know, relationship scales because we have so many products on the cart and we are solving real customer problems.

Agreed. Christine, this is your baby now. Yeah, I mean, if looking into, you know, what we do next, I think automation is really important because the go to market aspect of it, engaging with the field and, um, getting feedback from not just the customer, but from AWS themselves, um, and looking at how we're incorporating that into the roadmap, I think will be critical in order to get the scale.

So how do we, how do we make the user experience, you know, just a few clicks away, you know, to get access to the Yeah. To the product. You know, one of the themes that came up in our talk today was, look, suer is undergoing a bit of a transformation from a company where enterprise is primarily used it on pre to this new world that we're all living in now, where, you know, the hyperscalers, the clouds, you know, no one, no one is all in on any one, it seems right.

We live in a hybrid world, and, and this is a major focus shift a little bit for suse, right? Because you have to have your AWS offering has to be as good or better than the on-prem offering. But I think increasingly customers say, look, where I house my stuff, my infrastructure, my data, what have you is not important.

I want a solution that runs, right? I don't want a solution for on-prem and a different solution for AWS and a different solution for somewhere else or what have you. I want a solution.

How Ali as a, as a product guy, even at the rancher level, right? This is multi cluster at its, you know, take it to the Yeah. Logical end.

So you, you threw me a good bone because what you described is really like one of our key value props to our customers, which is choice, right? And we are not opinionated of where you run, or if you're running, you know, a red stack or a green stack or whatever color, right? Like you want to use there.

Um, we'll support you ar and I think that's, that's one of our strengths and that we've, throughout years, what we hear from customers is like, we don't lock customers in. And so that, that value prop or that corporate value really like reflects into our portfolio. Um, you see it with multi Linux manager, we support 15 plus operating systems with, um, on the rancher side, right?

Multi-cloud heterogeneity, right? Like is key is a key driver for us. And so that's where we provide customers.

That's what customers really enjoy, you know, given, um, reasons, um, market trends that we've seen and, and movements, you know, with customer or with, with other acquisitions, right? Like, customers feel locked in and we're here like to just, you know, cut those shackles and, and give them the freedom that they need. Last question.

There's, I don't know, 60,000 people here or something, right? Running around that show floor and around the area. What are you hearing from real life people about this relationship?

About the announcements, you know, feedback. I don't know if you've had a chance to go talk to real people yet, but I was, well, it was interesting 'cause I was talking to Barry earlier, right? Yes.

So, um, he understands the, he, he was really excited to see the, um, the agreement with the SAL packages and Right, because he understood from an AWS viewpoint, like they, they, they have their skillset, we have our skillset, and customers want to build applications. They don't wanna kind of pick and choose what libraries that they're gonna put into their application. They want it, they want it easy.

Mm-hmm. So I think the excitement that I'm hearing about the relationship is, um, wow, you guys have really done a lot with AWS in this past year. 'cause I think last year we were talking about what we're gonna do, and I think now we're talking about what we are doing.

And I think that's the biggest difference. Um, and I, our customers, you know, in the field, you know, with, uh, EKS and then also rancher, we get a lot of questions, uh, from the customer saying, well, I'm, I'm moving to EKS, or I'm an EKS customer. Now we have something there to offer that is specific and opinionated for that customer.

We don't have to, you know, kind of juggle around that answer. So that is from true customer feedback. Excellent.

You'd have it. I mean, uh, Alan, the energy here, 60,000 people, the number of meetings, the number of customers we meet, uh, the mental model that I think about at reinvent is you come here, you talk to your customers and get six months of work done in one week. 'cause you get all that feedback and then you go back into the hog wheel and bend.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

And that is, it's, it's, you get your, your, your, you know, you got your paddles out here now. Yeah. 10 is then you go home, you take this all back, internalize it and move, Holly, I'm gonna give you last word.

So From the show floor, what we hear is just amazing feedback about, you know, not so much new AI features. Again, like that's, that's a commodity already. But like the choice part that I described earlier, like, a lot of people are like, oh, so you're not just managing suse, oh, you're also managing, you know, other Kubernetes, other operating systems.

Like, that's been overwhelming feedback at the booth this week. Mm-hmm. They want one solution.

Rules 'em all. Yep. Absolutely.

Hey, thank you all. Thank all three of you for coming on here. I know you're all busy.

All of us are busy at this show, but thank you for taking time out to come on here. I hope everyone at home has enjoyed this. Uh, if you're watching this live, you're probably not here.

So I hope you brought a little bit of what's going on at Reinvent too. If you're watching this on demand later, good for you. I, I hope as well that you enjoyed it.

To mimic Christina, go to the marketplace, check out what's there. And, and you can see a lot of this for yourself. We're gonna be back.

We've got more SUSE coverage, more EWS coverage. We've got a lot of things going on all day today. You're watching Text Drunk tv.