Exploring Cloud Native Technologies with Peter Smails at SUSECON 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. We're back here at Scon and man, what a great couple days we're having up in Orlando, meeting a lot of different people.

Our next guest is Peter sms and with SE Peter, welcome to Textron tv. How are you man? I'm doing very well.

Thanks for having me. Absolutely. We Are having some fun in Orlando.

Yes, we are, man. Peter. Well, let's start with this.

What do you do at Suse? So, I'm the general manager of our cloud native business. So essentially I'm the, I'm the, you know, myself and my team wake up every day thinking all things cloud native.

Isn't everything cloud native today? It's, uh, not quite, not quite. It's running everywhere, But no, It is, it's obviously a very strategic area for, for Susan, for a lot of organizations.

It's a fun time to be in Cloud native because it's, it's all about modernization. It's all about helping organization move forward. So we're having fun and, and it's been a good week.

Absolutely. You know, I was talking to one of your partners last night, Porter Work Port. Oh, sure, yeah.

From Pure, yeah. They're part of the announcement. Yeah.

Yeah. And I, I was showing them we, you know, we'll be a cube con next month. Okay.

Yeah. See you there. Next month.

It's like two weeks. It's two. No rest for the weird, But then in July, every year we put on a virtual event on cloud native.

This year it's cloud native now, which is our cloud native site. Okay. One for the road.

Because the interesting thing about cloud native now, it's not necessarily even in the cloud anymore. It's everywhere. It's on the edge, it's in the data center.

It's, it's everywhere. Right. You running on bare metal, whatever you, you know, whatever you wanna run it on, you could run.

And, and it's not just Kubernetes or even containers per se. Yeah. It's observability.

It's mesh, it's, it's con native security. There is so many aspects. It, it, it's compute.

Yeah. That's what It's is. It is.

Today's compute. That, and that, again, Tyler, sort of tying it back to one of the key themes for us this week, you're, you're absolutely correct. It is, it's ubiquitous.

You know, use whatever term you want. Cloud native is everywhere. People are running mission critical and business critical workloads, multiple data centers, multiple clouds, multiple edges, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

So one of the things I talked about, one of the key themes for us this week is this notion of, it's a computing everywhere. Like, computing everywhere is the new normal. Yeah.

And so for us, what's cool is sort of two themes to take away from that. One is that it's computing everywhere. Sounds really, really simple, but it's actually complicated.

It's sort of one of the cornerstones of our value is that regardless of what you're running, where you're running at, what cloud, what distro, et cetera, we give you that simple single unified management experience. So sort of, you know, theme number one is it's computing everywhere world. So, you know, the, there, you can run all this stuff everywhere.

The key is simplicity at scale. Okay. So a lot of that is, is infra, infra, you know, structure centric.

And another key theme for us this week is sort of like, now it's actually becoming a lot about, to your point, it's not that it's not about infra, but you know, it's about security. It's an insecure world. You know, it's about observability.

You need problem determin, you know, problem determination, remediation. It is about workload capture. So we talked this week about integration with TE certification with Enos.

We talked about certification with SAP applications. I mean, talk about convergence of sort of traditional on-prem workloads. SAP is a hybrid cloud strategy.

You know, we play that on-prem part with our SAP applications. So rancher for SAP, um, so, and then obviously work a key big workload as well is the VMware migration stuff. So, to your point, infra is kinda like yesterday's news.

Yeah. Because it's ubiquitous. And now it's about workload capture and the security requirements, the observability requirements, the certifications, the GRC to be able to keep driving all of those workloads and consolidate them ultimately on our, this is my pitch.

You know, basically we want to be the platform for every organization's cloud native strategy. So it's all about driving work, capturing those workloads. I'm glad you brought that up though.

Cool. 'cause I gotta tell you, last night, well, yesterday evening, I was down in the, uh, solutions. So Yeah.

Showcase they call it, right? Yeah. And I had, I, I, I know and Andreas for A lot of time.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Cool, cool.

So, and Andreas brought me over to some folks and they gave, gave me a demo, ah, not a demo. More of a presentation on, let's call it the whole SUSE stack. Yeah.

From the Linux to, to ranches, K eight to, to the, the red. Was this the validated design? Was this the, He Showed you the Yeah, Val.

Okay. Cool, Cool, cool. And then everything, I don't know if people out here really realized, 'cause I walked away from there.

I was with Mitch Ashley, who's a mm-hmm. A, a analyst with FU and Sure. Friend of mine for hundred years.

I said, Mitch, I'm not sure. There's not more than one or two companies in the world that have this A to Z cloud native story. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, the fact that, and I, you know, I don't know how much of this you're really, I, I bet you are. But you know, like for instance, your own registry, where your containers are not just stuff you're pulling from repos all over, but you're repackaging them.

Mm-hmm. Scanning them, securing them. Oh yeah.

No, you're, you're making them available. Right? So it's like, it's almost a close.

I know you guys are open, big on open. No, No, but let's, it's A Closed system. Let's go right down that path, because you're touching on a really important theme for us.

Mm-hmm. So, back to the discussion about infra. So one of our, one of our big themes this week as well, so I talked about compute everywhere.

Yep. Check. Okay.

We talk about how it's an insecure world. Yep. Check, we've already covered the VM modernization move is on.

And then we talked a lot about developers need more. Okay. And so we have always been, Susan has a, you know, we have a huge reputation in develop, in providing developer tools.

So rancher, desktop, you know, massive deployments of rancher, desktop fleet. More recently with application collection. So we, and we, and we added private registry, which is based on harbor.

Yep. We added the virtual cluster management. Yep.

Via UI extensions. That's powered by K three K. So open source heritage, excuse me.

But the important related point is this week we introduced DevX validated designs. Yeah. Which is where you were going.

Yep. That is, you got it. Which is a big deal for suse.

'cause Yes, of course we're choice composability flexibility. Absolutely. But we can also be opinionated and prescriptive because there are, there are communities of developers, they want an A to Z.

And so this was an excellent, for number one, a great forcing function for us. But number two, to your point, it is having exactly the impact that you're talking about right now because people see this. And Yeah, the first, the first validated design, see if I can remember 'em all.

So it's, yes, it is slee, it's based container images based on slee. Yep. It is a GI ui.

Yep. That has special projects that we built in. It is, um, let me think.

We have the, um, we have the OCI artifacts. Okay. We have the OCR artifacts delivered securely through application collection.

So you're talking about zero C-V-E-O-C-I. So we're protecting those. You have security suse observability built in.

Okay. There's fleet. Yep.

There's arcade two. Yep. You put all this stuff together to your point, all of a sudden you tell this story supported by a ref, a, you know, reference architecture.

It's like, that's a really compelling story. So I think we're, we're pretty excited because we're certainly, uh, not that we're against, these Ideas don't work Here. Like, it's not that we're anti opinion.

No, no. You, but we've always been choiced. So now, but it's like, they're like, look, that doesn't go against our open source ethos or, or our choice ethos, but we can give people a very prescriptive answer.

And it's already the feedback. It's been really positive. So I'm glad you had that.

I, I love it was, it was, it was a, a eureka kind of thing for me. Nice. And, and I'll tell you something.

'cause Yeah. Here's the other truth that maybe people don't want to talk about, and that is, you could be open and still be locked in. Are a lot of people right.

Who say, well, I believe our primary competitors, we all claim to be open, right? Locked. And I'm quite confident that they all lock you in.

Yes. So let, well, let's call a spade a spade. That's, that's We bring you open.

I know we joke about, not joke, but like, we do bring, and I think this starts with DPN down, like we really do put our money where our mouth is in terms of being an open organization, you know, open, transparent. It means a lot of different things. But I think we really are in a unique position that we make good on that.

Call it our, you know, from our discussion, some of our listeners may not remember, but from our speaker yesterday. Yeah. The wingman contract, right?

Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Kind of thing about, we, I think we deliver on that, on our contract, you know, of being open and, and it, it, uh, I can only say that it from an anecdotal standpoint, it resonates with customers because they, they're, it could be funny, it could be mandate. So like, if you go into mia, there are mandates for multi-vendor.

Yep. So, number point by definition, you have to do that. There are mandates where people are just, you know, financially, they don't wanna be tied into a single cloud provider.

I mean, there's all these, You don't wanna be locked in. Yeah. You don't want, nobody wants to be locked in.

And so we're really the only independent non-hyper scaler that, and we partner with all the hyperscalers. Sure. Hyperscalers will say they're multi-cloud, but practically speaking, by definition, they're hyperscaler, you know?

Yep. Kind of thing. And then our, you know, our non, our non, you know, we've got our competitors that will also try to say that, but we really are the only independent, truly open, you know, heterogeneous solution on the market that really is, and that resonates.

And we just gotta keep making good on, we just, we gotta keep delivering on our promise. I know you gotta run. I got one more subject I want to Cool.

Turn up with you. And that's this, you, you mentioned a little bit about people looking at, for instance, virtualization choices. And, you know, we're at a unique juncture.

You know, sometimes it's just, I don't know, last month, I don't know if you saw all the planets lined up above the moon, you could go out and see like seven of the planets. Okay. My wife would've known that.

My wife too. I never even made it out. I was like, yeah, let me know how it looks.

Um, but we're at that kind of, we're at a bit of a unique juncture here, right? Number one, you have the licensing change around VMware, and that's forcing a lot of companies to reevaluate. Number two, they're evaluating, do I even want to go virtual or go right to a cloud native?

Yeah. Cloud native on virtual cloud native without virtual bare metal. What, what have you.

Yep. If I'm doing that, do I wanna move from the data center to the public cloud? How much do I wanna do?

What is the right ratio there? Do I wanna move to more than one public cloud? Yeah.

Ai, ML ops and ai and, and you know, do I want to look as long as I'm moving, is this the time for me to go from monolith to microservices? Yeah, It is. It is.

All of these things are happening right at this moment in time. Yeah. Right.

I don't know if we've ever had that kind of, It's, it is, no, you're, and there's a lot to unpack there. Sort of my might make Every one of those are major things, Every single one of them. But, but to me, the common theme with all of that, and this has really been it.

So, you know, I've been at this cloud native stuff for a while. So I've been with Susa for a while. I came to Susa through the, ran the acquisition of Rancher Labs.

Sure. You know, you know, we've been Yeah. You know, yes.

And the gang, and Shannon and everybody, Hey guys. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, but we, so we've been at this for a while.

But, but, and the thread, or the theme, I guess I wanna say is that we've always, essentially, our success is essentially riding the wave of cloud native adoption ultimately, which is a modernization story to all of these different events. The tides, and this isn't just a Susa thing, but like the, the winds or the tides, if you will, are steering towards this space, because there are factors that we could never in a million click. We couldn't create what Broadcom has created for the market.

We couldn't market our way into them. Nobody could do that. But you have that convergence going on.

So there are all these different, to your point, AI is, is, is now hitting it front and center. So it's all ultimately about modernization. Yeah.

People are figuring out what their strategies are. And Susa again, ultimately we're, we're incredibly well positioned. And so it's a fun time.

It's a fun time to be at Susa. We're having fun in Orlando. That's who are, you know, we're having great conversation.

It's good Stuff. Fun. Hey, for people out there who maybe wanna say, what the heck is he talking about?

I'd like to go see that. So here. No, no.

com. Okay. Just Google Scon.

com, you'll get the lowdown on the latest announcements, all that kind of stuff. You can also just find scon, because what you can do after the fact is you're able to register. Oh.

So you can watch sessions after the back and this kind of stuff. So check 'em both out. There's a ton.

I mean, we've covered so much ground. There's a, there's a ton of information that people can internalize and learn more, and then obviously love to chat with 'em. Absolutely.

You guys will be a cute con lunch. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

We'll See you there. You'll be there. We'll be there live.

Cool. It'll Be, be fun. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Enjoy the conversation. All right.

Peters smail here on Text Drunk tv. We're gonna take a break. We got more Han of videos coming at you, so stay tuned.