SUSE’s Peter Smails on KubeCon 2025 Trends: Observability, Container Management, and AI Readiness

Hi, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong tv. You know, I, I've so much going on in the world lately.

I've, I've had the pleasure of talking to the few of the folks at suse and, uh, but he's one of my favorite. If there were words, SU Cesarean, Susans, I don't know what the right thing is. I honestly don't know.

Let me get you, ntroduce you to my friend Peter SMAs. That smells with an m not an ad. Correct.

Otherwise we go snails with an you go the other way. It Snails, which is with an n. Snails with an N Easy.

Peter is the SVP and GM for Enterprise Container Management at suse. Peter, welcome back. It's great to have you on Tech Drug tv.

Thank you. It is always fun to be here. I love the conversations.

So a little bit of wishful thinking with that background. Or you're on vacation. I wish I was on vacation.

I, uh, I won't give too much. PII, but so I'm, I'm up in Massachusetts, so this is really more wishful thinking. It's a pretty nice fall day, I have to admit.

But that's definitely wishful thinking. Hopefully I'll be in a setting like this, but apparently this is your backyard from what I understand. So for you Well, it is pretty much, yeah, it's, well, so that beach is across the street from me, but I am, but I will be up in Boston actually in November.

My, my son is getting sworn into the Massachusetts bar. Oh, wow. And we, yeah, we're coming up, I think the 18th and 19th, something like that.

But congrats for that though. I'll be in Atlanta for CubeCon. I think you will too.

Yes, sir. And, and, uh, that's what I wanted to talk a little bit about today, about sort of a CubeCon preview of what, what we think maybe the big themes, themes that Cube Con are gonna be. And, and you know, what, what Susie, what's Susa doing?

And, and we're not here to talk about. I, I know you guys are gonna be releasing news and people are gonna just have to wait for that until CubeCon itself. Yeah.

But that doesn't stop us from talking about kind of the bigger themes. But before we do that, Peter, I, I wanted to jump into, I, I mentioned your SVP and GM of the Enterprise Container Management, I guess a division or team at, at suse. Well, you call it a business unit.

Okay. The bu Yeah. Great.

Is that the rancher business? What we used to know is Rancher business more than that. Let you know part of it.

Give us an idea of what that BU is about. Yeah, I, it that's a great, it's, it's a great question. I think the simplest way to answer it is it, it's technically a business unit, but at the end of the day, we have multiple businesses operating in context.

You know, so as you know, we're heavily focused on edge, we're heavily focused in AI specifically. We have a, we have a sister division, you know, around Linux. So I would abstract sort of away from sort of like what we call bus away from sort of what we ultimately deliver from a market standpoint to sort of sort of back a house versus front of house.

Because ultimately mm-hmm. What I'm, what I'm looking after and what I get up and care about every single day is, is ultimately cloud native. And I have counterparts I work with, there are other folks you talk with, you know, Keith, basil and you know, Avanav.

And so for all the different folks, but at the end of the day, we operate in concert. And so, kind of coming back to your point about next week, like we do have a bunch of news. We will, we'll sort of tease that a little bit now.

But thematically the important message for folks to take away, regardless of sort of the, the, the back of house bu stuff. At the end of the day, Suzy is all about delivering a platform. We are, you know, the market leading open infrastructure platform actually for not only Cloud Native, but also Linux.

Obviously I'm focused primarily on the cloud native stuff. So ultimately it is about putting all of our best resources forward to deliver this open infrastructure platform. What is an in open infrastructure platform that is basically a single unified management control plane for developing, deploying, and managing all of your cloud native workloads, regardless of where they are.

So again, that's where, from a platform, it could be everything from, we'll talk next week more about big focus around VMware modernization. We are a landing spot. Our open infrastructure platform is a landing spot for organizations that are modernizing away from VMware.

Okay. So we'll talk more about, so we continue to invest in virtualization as a core component of the platform. We have a bunch of exciting stuff we're gonna talk about next week around Prime.

Everyone knows Rancher Prime as the primary, you know, the primary platform for enterprise container management, if you will. And that's sort of the mm-hmm. The, the central control plane in the brains, if you will, from a, from an infra management standpoint.

Bunch of exciting stuff going on there around things like observability, um, infrastructure, resource optimization. You know, how do you basically make, how do we continue to make Prime for its part the best platform for all cloud native workloads? And that means you have to manage all the infrastructure.

It means you have to help people optimize the resources of that infrastructure. It means that you need to make the user experience as simple as possible. And so we're gonna be touching on, you know, uh, you have to give them the insight and visibility to be able to do intelligent things with that platform.

So you can imagine next week we're definitely gonna be touching on virtualization. We're definitely gonna be touching on things around observability. 'cause that's so front and center.

Um, we'll certainly be talking about AI and we can kind of double click on that. But you can, Ima the most important message, again, if people take nothing else away, the most important thing is when you think Susa and you think Cloud native, think Susa as the open infra platform for all of your cloud native workloads inclusive of those folks on ramping from VMware modernization. Absolutely.

You know, we, we've seen a real, or where I sit right. Seen a real evolution in what we, what cloud native is. Mm.

Right. For most of us, we call it cube con. Right?

And so if it's Cube Con, it's probably about Cube, about Kubernetes, right. Cube. But another name for the show is Cloud Native Con.

Mm. Right. And that's, I think the official name, or maybe they're both official now.

And I think this is the year that cloud native con becomes real. It's not just CubeCon anymore. Yeah.

You know, when you look at the top five projects that CNCF, I think at least two, if not three of them are observability related. Yeah. Yeah.

Ai, AI is pervasive up and down this stack. Yeah. Service me grown up.

Yeah. Well, if you're not doing AI at this point, you know, you gotta ask yourself why and how far behind the curve you are. Yeah.

Right. That, that's kind of where we are. It's crazy, but true.

Yeah, no, just a, a couple funny things on that front. Number one is that, uh, I technically have sort of two titles because I'm also the general manager of Cloud Native. And that's honestly part of the evolution because what you've said is, is, and, and I wanna say they're both, they're sort of interchangeable is my point.

Like, it's not, it's not two separate jobs, but to me, I think you're spot on. And the reason that you're spot on is if you go back, I mean, we've been at this a while, right? If you go back to the early days of Kob Con, which is around 10 years, right?

And the early days it was, how do I use Kubernetes? How does it work? What do I do?

You know, and that's where rancher, you know, like our, that's where we really cut our teeth. We were the first kids on the block because I'm an absolutely, we made Kubernetes easy, we made it simple. And that's why we have, you know, tens of thousands of active users.

It's this enormous community that's rooted in making Kubernetes simple, but where the market and everything is evolved. And why we talk now about being the cloud native platform is it's all, it's maturation. I mean, I, I joke about how cou it's still K Con, but look at sort of the, the, what's the word I'm looking for?

Sort of the commercialization of KB Con, kind of the, the, you know, the, um, the enter prioritization, the, you know, the look at the, the people coming. You go five years, six years ago, you go to KB Con, it's all backpacks, you know, and the sessions are super tactical now. You got a lot more suits.

You got a lot more ties. You got a lot more. And this is because a different set.

Look how I'm dressed. I didn't wear my jacket today. You know, I used to No, but I used to go in a t-shirt.

You're the, you're, so you gotta, you have to span the whole spectrum. So you gotta be able to do both. Mm-hmm.

So you put the blue blazer on the universal. Yeah. You know, I can do everything.

It's a uniform, but it's, but it's, but your point is valid, which is that it's now, I mean, just the, the ultimately the strategic value and the strategic nature of cloud native as a technology for enterprises, you know, small, medium, large enterprises. It's, it's business critical. It's mission critical.

It's no longer about does it work? How does it work? It's about the overall ecosystem.

It's about maturation, it's about security postures. It's about, to your point about observability, accelerating remediation, reducing risk, reducing tc, I mean, it's just the whole thing has become, it's still about tech and innovation and all that kind of stuff, but fundamentally, the nature of the conversations are changing. So it's just the overall landscape is, is evolving.

And it's super fun because from the beginning of time, you know, the thesis has always been, you know, those who can basically, from a, from a, from a go to market or from a business strategy standpoint, like those that can provide, you know, consolidated management, you know, in simple management of a cloud native infrastructure will do well going forward because you're riding the wave of adoption of cloud native within the enterprise. And, you know, the VMware stuff with Broadcom is just one more mega catalyst that is creating motivation in the catalyst for people. Say, you know what?

I don't want to replace, like, for like, this is gonna help me accelerate my cloud native modernization journey. What do I use? Where do I go?

And I can only, I can only reflect on that in terms of, just from a SOA business standpoint, that's exactly what we're seeing happen. It's, these are C-suite conversations. These aren't, you know, you go back five, six years ago, it's just purely developers, but completely bottoms up.

Now you're talking c it's completely the other way around. It's, it's actually completely, it's both obviously. It, it, and it meets in the middle.

Yeah. 'cause there's a middle out element to it. But here's an interesting thing.

You know, we recently did a whole series of webinars with AWS and some of their partners around, around VMware, around modernization, transformation, moving to cloud, et cetera, as you would imagine with a WSI think the whole Broadcom VMware licensing issue, if we could call it that. But we all know licensing is just another word for dollars and cents. The price increase it's given people, it, it, it, it's sort of a, a boundary layer where people are now saying, wait a second, I may wind up paying what they want me to pay.

I may stay on VMware. Yeah. But this is an inflection point where I now should take a look at what my options are.

Do I want to get rid of virtualization all together? Like run, run cobe on bare metal? Do I want to still keep a hypervisor but run a cloud native stack with microservices on top of that, on maybe one of the hyper, you know, hyperscalers virtualization platforms.

Do I want to use a SUSE and standardize because I'm not moving everything to the cloud today? Today. And like we never will.

Like we never will. Exactly. And so I want something, I don't want one os there and one os here.

And I, I want to keep my stack consistent. So I, I need a susa kind of, that that bridges that, that's, yep. Um, all, all of the above.

A little of this, I want to be on multiple clouds. And that, by the way, just to jump in there, it's, it's again to, from a Susa overall value proposition, you, you, you've, thank you. 'cause you've nailed it because it is a bit of all of the above, you know?

Yep. But it's, for us, it's for us, it's not about being like, for like sort of get from point A to point A in the context of virtualization, but to your point, it's, it's, it's like, um, it is absolutely a catalyst. It's creating conversations.

And the key is you have to be adaptable. You have to be flexible, you have to be composable, you have to be open because it's not, it isn't a one size fits all. And that's something we're finding from a, just from an overall market landscape and from a Sosa, you know, value proposition.

People really are drawn to the openness and the flexibility. It's not sort of an R way or the highway kind of thing. We are a bridge, but we're also a retirement home for VMs.

Like, it's, there's, it's all about what ultimately the organization our customers are trying to do. And we're well positioned there because of the openness and composability of our platform relative to others are more like, okay, here's your box, here's your big box, which you can put here, there, or everywhere. So it just sort of speaks to our different approach to the market, I guess is really what I'm saying.

Absolutely. Well, and it, you know, it, it, it, I think it speaks to suse being a full spectrum, I guess is a good word. A full spectrum solution.

Peter, you gotta look ai, it, it's, it's on, it's in every conversation now. Everybody has a, a situa, you know, a story. Everybody's doing things.

I know SUSE is mm-hmm. Uh, without, you know, going into the specifics of your announcements next week, how do you see AI playing in these things we're talking about? Yep.

And that's, uh, very easy. Uh, very answer, very easy answer. Um, sort of two things.

I'd say two dynamics. Number one is we want to be, we said we want to be the open infrastructure platform for all workloads. Okay.

That's inclusive of ai. So we will absolutely be talking about the work that we're doing continuing to do around suse ai. Okay.

And that's about being the best platform for running AI workloads. Okay. So one is, and there's a lot there, and we can unpack that next week at the show and so forth.

But basically, one is about being the platform. So that's vector number one. And, and no surprise, wait for it.

It's about being open, it's about being composable, it's about being flexible. So we'll double click on all that stuff next week. The other big piece though, is also obviously ai, you know, agentic from a user experience standpoint.

So no surprise, we will absolutely be talking about our efforts on that front, um, around the use of ag agentic, f*g, agentic for enhancing the user experience of the platform. So I'd say those are the two primary vectors. Um, and both fronts are quite exciting.

I know there's, you know, everybody might wanna try and say that I'm, I'm really pleased and excited with the stuff that we're doing. I think we're gonna blow some minds when people can get into the details and come see it in the booth and play with it and do all that kind of stuff. So we're excited for next week.

Very cool. Yeah. You mentioned something before about the kind of the, let's call it the changing demographic mm-hmm.

For OpCon, for cloud native con attendees. And, you know, I've seen it too, right? We, we, in my mind though, beyond, beyond how they dressed, we went from a very developer, heavy, real developer heavy, Hmm.

Almost exclusively developer. Then we saw the rise of the ops folks, right? What I think we've seen over the last couple years is a combining of DevOps and Cloud native as well as platform engineering, right?

Platform engineering has a huge audience at, at cloud, native Comic Q Con. And it's a, I think the most po last, the last one, it was the most popular, like zero day mm-hmm. Uh, event was the platform engineering one.

Yeah. I, and actually you triggered thought, I'm glad you mentioned that. And again, without, without you have to come tune in next week.

But, um, we've always been, uh, you know, super strong on the ops side, you know, and we've made great, you know, we've, we've invested a lot of time and energy and resource and innovation, you know, on the developer side as well. And that's both from an open source standpoint, clearly just from a community innovation standpoint as well as, you know, from a commercial platform standpoint. And so, uh, I think people are gonna be, uh, suffice it to say we have a, we have, you know, our open source community has a very, very, very, very large developer community.

Okay? The rancher developer community has a very large community. And so there's some really exciting stuff we're doing on that front that is actually gonna sort of, if you will, big shift left.

Because to your point about developers, they're still front and center. So if you look at the maturation of the market, a lot of say security and security posture and that type of stuff would get taken care of by the ops folks. But where the world continues to shift is, you know, how do you put even more and more, how do you continue to meet developers where they are now, but more of that control into, you know, move it upstream, whether it's security, et cetera, you know, secure supply chain, that kind of stuff.

So I'll leave it at that, but there's some super fun stuff going on. 'cause we stay, we, we absolutely stay near and dear to the developer community and we got some very cool stuff coming down next week. I think people are gonna, I think people are also gonna real just net net.

I don't know if I can hide my enthusiasm. We're obviously looking forward to next week because we're, we're all in the mail. We're bringing some exciting stuff.

So we can't wait to, to share it with everybody and, and have, you know, come join us in the booth and play with it. I love it. Peter.

You know, I always tell people passion is contagious. I love the passion. I agree.

Thank you. I agree. No, I appreciate it.

I love these conversations. Absolutely. Hey, there's gonna be a lot of, uh, of news next week on this.

We're gonna try to get you or some of the Sousa people over to, we'll be, we'll be broadcasting live all week from the show floor. Nice. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

Sweet. Um, so we will catch up with you there when we could talk more openly about this. But, you know, I think, as you said, suffice to say, there's a lot of, lot of stuff to be unpacked.

I think it's gonna be a great event. It's gonna be a great Kon. Atlanta's a great town.

Yeah. Um, and by the way, one thing, I gotta get this in as well 'cause this is all completely public, but remember when we talk about open infrastructure for Susa, let's not forget about Linux. We just made a massive announcement on this last 16 stuff.

So again, next week is obviously sort of, you know, folks on that side. But again, folks, when you take it away, this is building directly on top of all the very cool stuff we've that's been this last month. Well, that is the underpinning for all of this, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Look, just a little plug on my own. So I wrote a nice article on this.

Go check it out. It's, you did, it's brilliant. It's brilliant.

Yeah. Thank you. On tech strong it.

So go check that out. You know, I talk about AI and everything else that I think was, is a big story there, Peter. We'll talk more in Atlanta.

Come ready and, uh, I'm already ready. Look forward to seeing you next week. All right, my friend Peter Smails, SVP and GM Enterprise Container Management at suse, doing, giving you a quick CubeCon preview.

We'll see you next week in Atlanta. This is Alan Shimmel for Tech Trunk tv, though. We're gonna take a break right here.

We're gonna be back with more. Stay tuned.