Margaret Dawson & Alan Shimel Preview AWS re:Invent 2025: AI, Open Source, and Multi-Cloud Innovation | AWS re:Invent 2025

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to our coverage of AWS Reinvent 2025, uh, from Las Vegas. I'm really happy to have my friend Margaret Dawson here.

Margaret yes. Is the CMO at suse, but beyond that, she's one of the most interesting people that I love interviewing, to tell you the truth. And here I'm being your partner today.

Yes. We're doing a different thing. You know, if you can't tell, sus SUSE is our sponsor, uh, sponsoring partner for our text on TV coverage.

This here at Reinvent. You've seen this up here, you know, all throughout the show, but now we actually have someone from Sushi here to talk to. Here's the deal, though.

We're gonna be doing a couple of different interviews today. Right now, I just wanna kinda lay out Margaret as sort of an overview. And also I wanted, look, you're a veteran of reinvent.

Yep. You've been here a bunch of times, as have I. This one feels a little different.

Hmm. And, and if you don't mind, let's start right with that. Okay.

What's different this year? Well, what's the same? Is it still a lot of people?

Oh, yeah. I, I haven't seen the count, but it is massive. Um, so it feels bigger than ever.

It feels like we've come fully back from whatever downturn we had. Yeah. What's different, you know, the one thing that's interesting, and you and I have chatted about this a little bit, is that we're not hearing the word cloud.

We're not really hearing cloud, Which is kind of weird for aws, but I think it's just because like, we're there, like it's inherent. Um, I will say in conversations with, you know, people that are wa, non NOTAM Amazonians and, and people that are here at the conference, we are still having that conversation about how do I manage things across all Preem all the way to multi-cloud. Um, in my Amazon meetings, we are talking about multi-cloud.

We are talking about, you know, how do we have that seamless experience for our customers? So it's there. I just think it's under the weight of everything.

Ai. Yeah. Right.

So everything is is kind of under that bigger umbrella, which you'd expect It, it seems to be all AI all the time. Yep. And, and it's not just the word cloud.

In, in years past you'd come to an AWS conference and you'd spend a lot of times talking about things like S3 or Lambda Yep. And serverless Kubernetes even. Right.

All of that has become sort of cosmic background radiation as we focus on how AI is gonna empower all of these. Well, all of it's AI is integrated into all of that. I will say, if you go into some of the sessions that are more technical, you're still getting that.

Yeah. Like I was at a, an EKS session yesterday. I was at an Amazon Linux session yesterday.

So you're still getting into the guts and getting roadmaps and, and all that, but it's, it's a level down. Yes. Right.

So you're probably not seeing that quite as much, but I think you're right. Like we're talking about, okay, how is AI helping us with Linux? How is AI helping us with container management or Kubernetes?

How is AI helping us with general management of our cloud ecosystem? Absolutely. So I, I want to talk about, 'cause it's, when we say ai, it's like AI in all its flavors.

Yep. But before we get into that, you mentioned Amazon Linux. Yep.

And I, we'll probably talk about it a little more in depth later, but I know SUSE had a, a big announcement around this. We did. Um, and this is exciting because I think that at this AWS reinvent, we're really transitioning from being a listing on a marketplace to a strategic partner.

And to me, the difference is, is when you start adding extra value to their software, right. And that's what we're doing with Amazon Linux, with what they announced around supplemental packages for Amazon Linux or sp mm-hmm. Which that's a cute name.

Sp And so we are providing open source components that have been tested, verified, secured, et cetera, as part of those packages. Um, and so what I love about this is that our passion is open source. I think Amazon is a huge consumer of open source, but you don't necessarily see that as a customer.

Right. And now they're bringing that choice to their customers in a secure, in a reliable way, which is what we do. Right?

Absolutely. That's, that's like our, our secret sauce. So, um, to me that that transition is exciting.

And then the second thing if we just kind of keep going with what we're announcing is we now have SUSE Rancher for AWS, which is a SaaS solution. Really? So we now have two.

Okay. I didn't realize it was SaaS. Yeah.

We have two SaaS. So we have Observability cloud. Mm-hmm.

And we have SUSE Rancher that are both delivered SaaS through the marketplace, you know, no touch. So, you know, try before you buy the whole thing. And I think that's also kind of moving that lever to a new place.

And with that, we can now manage not only EKS, but any flavor of Kubernetes. Right. Wow.

So if someone has EKS, which a lot of customers are leveraging their Kubernetes, but let's say they also have two or three other flavors of Kubernetes across things, we can now manage all of those clusters. Um, the original intent was just managing multiple clusters of EKS, which is very hard. Mm-hmm.

Right? Um, Amazon has a very strong management plane kind of per Kubernetes cluster, but not this way. Right.

We can help you manage all of those clusters, plus any other flavors. I think that also comes into play if you are using multi-cloud. Right.

You've got some a hundred percent Kubernetes on AWS some's on Google or Microsoft or somewhere else, or Oracle, wherever you could manage them all with that. That's right. I, I wanna go back to SP mm-hmm.

SPAL. Um, you know, so I'm a security guy. I've got 25, 30 years in before we called it cyber.

Yep. One of the biggest problems we face right now is this, what we call software supply chain security. Right?

Right. Because software today is kind of Frankenstein. We put together a lot of mm-hmm.

Components, pieces, scripts, add a little special sauce, and out it goes, being able to put in these components and pieces that we know are secure. They're not injected with malware, they're not, they're up to date, they're someone else's job to make sure their Security. But there's still all the open source pieces that developers love.

Right. So we are testing, and that is exactly what you want as if I was a CIO at an enterprise Right Now, you know, you want your developers to build the apps the way they wanna build them, but you cannot afford to have an untrusted or potentially vulnerable component In any way if you're a CIS. So a Ciso Well, CISO would be even more that way.

Yeah. Correct. You, you're loving this.

Yeah. Because that's, that's how malware gets injected percent into our supply chain. Yep.

Right? And I think that's critical. And I mean, this is our whole value prop, right?

Is taking open source and putting it through that trusted supply chain. And I was thinking about this an analogy, and, you know, I love cars, so I just went back to cars. Like you think about the old days with Ford, they built everything, every component was Ford, every manufacturing line, the whole supply chain was a single company airplane.

Same way. Boeing. Yep.

Third today, everything third is sub-components third party. Yeah. And what happens if you get a component in an even a physical car or you know, an airplane that hasn't been, you know, gone through that test testing and security and all those things, and something breaks down, you can never find it.

Same thing with code. Think about it. One of these little libraries or components or tools isn't trusted To find that piece, once you've built out an application, is very, very hard.

So how you bring in that trusted supply chain is critical. Absolutely. And, but this is a very elegant solution to that, right?

Mm-hmm. And, and, And they don't have to leave Amazon because remember, developers love working in AWS They Do. Yes, they do.

It is a very, they and that's really the AWS secret sauce. It is, is they grab the, the, I feel like we forgot one of our announcements. Yes, you did.

There's a third one. There is. The other big one is we are integrating Amazon Q and Amazon Bedrock.

So two foundational pieces of their AI story, um, with both of our Linux and suse Linux Enterprise and, uh, SUSE Rancher Prime. Really. So now the com, the capabilities around those two, um, AI solutions, uh, can be fully utilized when you're using within Amazon.

Mm-hmm. Correct. You know, there's another sort of undercurrent that I, I wanted to hit on, and that is, you know, some people call it modernization.

Some people call it transformation, but it's the, and I'm not pointing fingers or anything, but a lot of people's VMware licenses tripled, right. As part of the acquisition. And it's not necessarily that they're moving off of VMware because of that license mm-hmm.

Upgrade, but it's giving them time a, a pause to reflect and say, Hey, what options do I have? Well, and I think what's important is that most of those people, and the reason we're calling it modernization or transformation, is they're not trying to replace what they already have in their traditional, or sometimes we call that legacy infrastructure. Mm-hmm.

They're trying to look at this transition as a way to get into cloud native. Yep. So if you can have a virtualization solution that moves your VMs towards the future in a way that is somewhat elegant, you know, and then you can move to containers from there, that's what you want.

Because right now that migration can be sometimes challenging. Yes. And so for suse, that's our sweet spot.

So what we're saying is, look, we're not gonna go into your data center and replace all that, but if you wanna move some of those workloads to Cloud native over time, we have a virtualization solution that is very sweet. And now we've made it easier than ever to move those VMs very, very quickly over to suse. And then you're on the path, you're on the same platform, same rancher platform, suse virtualization, lives on rancher.

Mm-hmm. Um, and so you can get to cloud native much more easily, and it can be managed in the same way. So that's a key thing.

I mean, I'm, I'm just thinking about this common theme is managing things in a common way, a single control plane. And we do that with both virtualization and containers on rancher. I love it.

And, and it is, you know, whether you want to call it modernization, transformation, I don't care. It is the path to getting onto the cloud without having to necessarily move everything to the cloud. But it's also about having one foundation, one platform that allows you to manage no matter where you are, whether it's AWS in your data center or another cloud provider or what have you.

And that's critical because some people think they have to consolidate to have that control. And in some cases, for sovereignty, maybe that's true. Mm-hmm.

But I think most people want that control, but they also want choice. So how do you get choice with control? Control?

I mean, to me that's suse. So su I was just gonna say you spell it SUSE, but, um, I feel like I'm on a TV commercial, but you know what, I, you mentioned sovereignty. I do want to come back to that.

We don't have time to jump into it right here, because I wanted to return to all the many flavors of ai and we're hearing here it, you know, No, I think this is something Amazon is doing very well at this, right? They have Bedrock, which is really all about foundational models, right? Mm-hmm.

And how you can plug those in and they're, they're really starting to say, I dunno if it's bring your own LLM, but they're making it easier for you to work with many, many different models. Yes. Um, with q they're really bringing together, you know, agentic ai, generative AI in one place.

So while we are seeing, I guess, a merging of these different flavors, I think we do need to be careful not to just say AI to loosely and assume that everyone knows what we're talking about. 'cause there's very different things under that larger vernacular Umbrella umbrella. Sure.

You know, Margaret, you mentioned that it, it'll, it gives you freedom around mm-hmm. Your, your AI choices, what frontier model you want to use, right? But also they announced something else called Forge.

Right? Which allows you to create your own frontier model. Now look, there's, there's only four or five frontier models in the whole world that we're all having to use right now.

The ability to do that and bringing it down so that SMEs small, medium enterprise and enterprises can create their own is an amazing, you know, choice. Uh, or it gives people options to really do this. Um, I I, I, I don't know how many people are actually going COVID.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think that's my problem then.

That's gonna be a rare thing. But I, I, let's go back to what you just said, because I think thematically at reinvent and at AWS something that excites me is that we are talking more about open source. We are talking more about choice, choice.

We're talking more about allowing people to work the way they wanna work as they work with AWS and their, I don't know, thousands of partner ecosystems. And that is exciting because I think that is a shift, um, just culturally or, or value wise. And I think, you know, everyone sees that that is the future and it's great for customers.

Absolutely. I want to talk about partner systems and everything else, but we've, we've got a few more interviews. We do.

We're gonna do stay tuned. We've got a, a really, a great bunch of SUSE information and not just suse. I don't, we've got our Amazon partners, partners, everything going on here in Reinvent.

I'm looking forward to it, Margaret, but it's not just Margaret and I, we have more people coming on. Um, so stay tuned for that. You're watching Tech Trunk tv.

We're at AWS Reinvent, sponsored by ssa.