Exploring the SUSE and AWS Partnership at SUSECON 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel for Techron tv, and we're back in sunny Orlando for Scon 25. It's been a great, well, this is our second day, but today was really the full day, first full day where we've done a lot of interviews.

I hope you've been following along at home, watching our interviews, and you've enjoyed them and found them useful. Our next one's gonna be a little different. I got a little fireside chat going on here.

I've got three guests. Let me introduce you to them. First of all, to my immediate right.

And we've practiced this and practiced this, but nevertheless, I'm sure I'll mess it up. Kabil Kabil. Maja, Ma?

Yes. Maji. All right.

Kabi, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience? Sure, Sure. Hi everyone.

My name is Kabi Maheen. I, uh, manage all of our, uh, global partnerships covering, uh, commercial Linux at AWS At AWS That's important to mention. Yeah, Welcome.

I might seem like a his employee, but, uh, I'm, uh, definitely an AWS complete. We're Working on it. We're Working on it.

I'll leave it at that. I'm gonna move on from you, fill it to our next guest, Christina Puccio. Correct?

Yes. Hey, Christina, how are you? Why don't you introduce yourself?

I will. Um, my name's Christine Puccio and, uh, been with SUSE for about a year and a half. Started, uh, working with all the global cloud providers, um, and now very focused on AWS and, uh, it's been a wonderful relationship and really enjoying it.

Fantastic. And then to my far right is Ali Reese Ali, welcome. Why don't you introduce yourself.

Hi, everybody. I'm Ollie Reese. Um, I'm running product for SUSE's, um, cloud native, um, business unit, and I dabble in product strategy, and I'm really excited to talk about our partnership with AWS today.

Fantastic. First of all, all three of you. Thanks for coming.

Now I know what people at home are. Think here AWS what's, what's the Susa connection here? Right?

We could run a lot of things on A DWS. Why should I run Susa? What does Susa offer on AWS What, what's the special sauce we're gonna ask you?

And then we'll see what the SUSE folks agree on. Uh, I'm sure they'll, uh, agree with hopefully most of what I have to say. Uh, you know, the Susie's bread and butter product has been SUSE Enterprise Linux.

Sure. And, uh, they've been essentially a launch partner, launch partner since EC2 launch back in 2006. Uh, and, uh, we've been partners ever since.

Great. So even today we have sled, we have sleds for SAP that runs innately on the console on the EC2 console. Uh, it's a, it's a very prime, uh, privileged location to be in.

And, uh, we've fully leveraged that piece. And, you know, this, that product has really grown exponential over the last several years. Uh, and if you look at specifically SAP workloads running in the cloud, the gold standard is less.

Right. And, uh, and Susie has been really good partners with us Yeah. In, uh, getting us to where we are today.

I love it. Yeah. I feel like we're gonna play a little new leeway game here.

So this is what he said, the partnership's about what do my Susie people say is about, Well, well, I mean, I agree. And, and also, um, you know, we have been partners for 15 years Yeah. Over 15 years.

And we started, you know, on the EC2 console making very easy for customers. It's been up infrastructure inclusive of the os, and it became very natural for someone to go in and use Payas. You go.

And it did a whole different form factor for customers. And now with SUSE's, um, acquisition of Rancher and New Vector for security, we found ourselves looking at how do we, how do we do more together? And of recently we've, you know, looked at Marketplace as a, an additional deployment method for software.

And so within the last, I think year or so, we've have all of our offerings on, on Marketplace. And, um, why, why that's important for customers is because we have a, a variety of ways that they can transact. Like they can transact multiple products if they want inclusive of less and and less for SAP.

Um, if they don't wanna pay as you go model, they can transact the marketplace. And now we have rancher and, and New Vector, and now we're moving in more to SaaS. And I'm not gonna actually steal all these senators.

I'm, I'm gonna pass it along, you know, before the Stack State acquisition. You could take it from there. If I feel like we're, we're going on a chronological Warrior, we are going.

Yeah. Well, and so having observed how Susan A WSF partnered 15 years ago, if our first less listing that we, you know, celebrated, I think like what we see now emerging is, um, you know, we have joint customers, but we're also to some degree competitors. Right.

Specifically in the, in the container space. Right? Sure.

But there's a healthy relationship that we enjoy with AWS actually, um, in working together. Right. I'm responsible for the cloud native, the rancher portfolio of products.

And, you know, there's, there's good collaboration where we can actually create good outcomes for our customers. You know, in working together and, and providing, you know, multi-class management to EKS customers, a lot of our customers have, um, hybrid footprints right. In the cloud and on-prem.

And I think this is where we can just show the strength of the rancher cloud native platform, right. That we've built. And so working together with AWS and sort of the table stakes, right?

But also looking in the future of like, what can we do together? Right? Like those are exciting topics.

Yeah. You know, that, that we're looking into working together. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting in, in some ways it is the chronological order that we followed here. We started all with the basic, can I run through Linux on, on the AWS platform, Uhhuh table stakes, right?

Then we moved up into, into, well, rancher certainly, you know, is is the cloud native piece of it, but we've got other, uh, a stack state, uh, observability Yeah. Security, right? These are all, and that's the hope.

That's the AWS way, right? Yep. Is you, you have that base infrastructure as a service, but then you layer on software as a service, you layer on more solutions as part of it.

And, and these represent some of, some of those layers. The other thing I'll say is, you know, in some ways AWS mirrors the larger market, right? Yeah.

In that, Hey, here's our platform. You could run any number of different linuxes. We, we have one we could do for you, but you're free to use whichever Linux you want.

Pick what's best, and let the market determine what's the best tool for the job app. Correct? Yeah.

Not just the market, but the customer. Well, in this case, right? You know, Suzy's motto is, choice happens.

But one of our, one of our, well, I would say one of the main leadership principles, we have 16 of 'em at Amazon, that, uh, funnily enough, we get, we quote in the active meetings, you know, and the, the thing that gets quoted the most is customer obsession. And the reason why we are so obsessed with our customers and making sure that they have the optimal experience on our cloud is because we want to give them choice. Mm-hmm.

Right? It goes great with our partnership where SUSE is about choice happens, and that's exactly what we want to deliver to our customers. We want to get present all of the choices.

Mm-hmm. Right? Whether that's suse or any of the other commercial Linux providers, or even our own home brew, Amazon Linux solution.

And we want the customer to de to decide. And it's not a, a singular decision where if you choose Amazon Linux or, or choose suse, like you're stuck, right? You can have any all single one, like whatever, whatever you want to use in whatever use case for that specific workload.

So, you know, this goes to choosing the best tool for the job. Yes. Right.

And may and in locked in, Holly, you brought up something about private cloud, public cloud, right. And look, though, AWS would love everything to run on AWS Absolutely. They live in a multi world.

Yeah. Some people wanna stay in their data center, some people go to public cloud and are, you know, moving back. Other people are saying, well, I'll keep some stuff here, but I'm gonna move some stuff to the edge.

Maybe there's a certain kind of thing that I wanna run on a different public cloud, you know, data sovereignty or, or whatever. I'm going to use something else over there. And really it's about choice happens.

Mm-hmm. Right? Thi this is, you mentioned it, it, it is about choice happens, but I also feel like that we live in a, you know, uh, it's such an interesting time right now because look, we haven't, right now for many reasons, people are deciding, do I wanna stay on-prem or move to the cloud?

So I want to go a little bit in public cloud and some in private cloud. Do I wanna move from a monolith to a, to a microservice architecture, right. Using containers and cloud native stuff.

Do I wanna be on the edge? You know, I need to have some stuff on the edge. What about AI?

A little further down the horizon? What about quant? Right?

These are all things that I think organizations watching this are grappling with right now, right? Yeah. I think 10 years ago, it was a very, it was a simpler road.

2006, you even Singular. It was very, Yeah. Do I want to lift and shift?

Right? Right. And get outta the infrastructure business.

Yeah. It was an easy decision. There's a lot more that goes into these decisions now.

Uh, and I think that's been a message here this week at sica, right? The, the, when you talk about choice, what's really interesting about the relationship here is that we're working with the commercial Linux team over at AWS an example of this is, um, suse Linux, um, um, support and then management. So it was, it's our management, you know, support for a variety of Linux operating systems, inclusive of Amazon Linux, right?

So it just shows that, you know, we're not, we're not, um, looking at it at SUSE as singularly as well, we want to provide the customer choice because working backwards, that's what they have. They have a variety of different deployment mechanisms. And you touched upon this with EKS and also, you know, with Rancher, they use certain tools for EKS, they cer use certain tools for rancher.

How are we co-innovating and co-developing so that the customer doesn't have to kind of piece that together, but it becomes more seamless and it is more of a software as a service, a better deployment experience, and also a cost effective experience as well. Yeah. Agree.

And it's, for us, it's like, you know, meeting where customers, meeting the customer where they are in their journey, right. Because it's a very complex world, right. That it, um, departments, platform engineering teams and whatever have to navigate.

And there's no prescriptive one size fits all solution to it. Um, you know, and we see from the competition that there's, you know, more focused approach to that. I don't wanna say lock in, but like, you know, there's little less flexibility to address customer needs, right?

And so with our portfolio across all of suse, right? Any type of Xi Christine just mentioned, right? We'll support you.

We have your back, you know, any type of migration, you know, from, from VM based workloads to maybe a cloud native modernization story, right? Like, we'll pick you up where you are. We are here with your trusted partner.

You know, with our portfolio. We, we actually came out, um, last year at lascon. We came out with a promotion around, um, suse multi Linux support.

And that was really to address the CentOS customer. And we actually received so many, uh, new customers jointly well for us. And then as well as helping, you know, the CentOS customers kind of home that were on AWS and that we're still running that, that promotion.

It's, it's, uh, S-M-L-S-L. Mm-hmm. And we are, we actually introduced something here now, uh, targeted more at the commercial Linux.

So if they're paying, you know, more than they want to on, on specific, uh, commercial Linux, um, platforms that they could actually come to us and we would actually help them with that support. So, and we have another promotion there for, for a professional, um, um, our professional package. But it just shows that, and that is all on AWS marketplace solely.

And we've, we've done something exclusively with AWS and it just shows that, um, you know, we're here for the cus we're listening to the customers as it pertains to Rancher and, and SUSE Rancher hosted, um, that we'll be launching at KubeCon. You'll touch upon that, I'm sure. But we're actually per working with the customers and getting our customers to talk to other customers, and we've been providing feed, the customers are actually providing feedback into the roadmap.

And that is true open source and, and the whole, you know, backing of, of us really supporting our community. So you mentioned rk, right? We'll be there, we'll be live streaming, live with the full set of great, uh, in London.

But it, it is an interesting thing, right? Because a lot of people, you know, for a lot of people, the Linux wars are over. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. What happened with cento acid, there's been some licensing changes.

But here's an interesting thing that's going on in the open source drug. Just because you use open source software doesn't mean you don't get locked in, right? Right.

You could use the A kernel, and I don't mean to say the Linux kernel, but you know, a kernel of open source and you have all this proprietary stuff that kind of sinks into it. And if you change that kernel, all of this stuff doesn't work anymore. And so I, I think people learning that lesson, oftentimes the hard way, fortunately and open source itself, we're seeing a lot of licensing changes in open source, right?

Yeah. And, and, and this has happened. We see it, we see it in, in cloud native as well, right?

You go on AWS there's a lot of different distros you could run for coop. Yeah. Right.

Containers and so forth. Um, but the market has a way of choosing the winners and the losers given a somewhat level playing field, right? Right.

If it's not too tilt in one way or the other. Um, and I think that's, that's what we see playing out here. However, again, I I think we're, we're coming to the point where can can too much choice be a bad thing.

Yeah. I think, I think what you're getting at is, um, you know, this is not a zero sum game, right? That's exactly, yeah.

Uh, as customers are, are thinking about breaking down their monolithic applications and going towards the containerization, uh, solution, there's quite a lot of op like options out there. You can do a home brew Kubernetes based, uh, yeah. Ation, uh, I don't know why you would, but you could right?

That that choice is there. Mm-hmm. But then we also have more opinionated platforms, right?

From the other commercial Lin Linux vendors. And then of course SUSE has their own entire rancher platform. And when a customer is going to the cloud, especially if they're considering AWS, they're probably first presented with EKS, uh, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

So what we're doing here with AWS and SUSE together is how do we tell that EKS plus rancher story, right? It's not an either or mm-hmm. Because the customer wants that native experience on A-W-S-E-K-S might be a great choice.

Maybe not. That's okay. If they choose EKS, that doesn't mean that they don't also get value for of rancher where you have that single pane of glass for multi cluster management, right?

So EKS might just be one piece. To your point, a lot of customers want a hybrid approach. Yeah.

It's not just an on-premises or AWS, right? Like, we're not oblivious to the, to the fact that, I don't know if I could, if I'm allowed to say that word, but there are other cloud providers out there. Oh, really?

Shocked. It was rambling going on here. And, And we wanna, we want to, uh, we don't want to, to your, to use your words, we don't want to customer to feel like they're being locked in.

And and I think this is where EKS plus a rancher story really makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So just to some of the announcements that have been shared this morning in the keynote, right?

Like, um, I'm personally really excited about, um, you know, what we call SUSE Rancher hosted as a SaaS offering, right? Like, 'cause that gives customers on AWS the, um, ability to manage their state from one single pane of class with EKS, but also OnPrem with other cloud providers as well, right? Because that's one of the, the strong forces of, of branches heterogeneity, right?

And multi-cloud, multi-class management. And so, you know, that's, that's a very strong message, you know, to you, what you just said, Kevin, about like a no lockin, and then I think this type of interoperability is just table stakes that customers are expecting, right? That's, that resonates with our company values.

It resonates with AWS's values, right? And I think that's, that's a strong message building on top of that, right? Then we enable additional value creation.

So we just, um, um, released at Reinvent in November, right? Like, um, suse Cloud Observability, right? A full blown, um, observability solution out of our acquisition of Stack State last year, right?

And that's also available to customers, you know, per preferably rancher customers or users, but also any other Kube user out there, right? On AWS, right? And so that's a very strong observability tool, right?

And it, it just right there makes, makes your stance, um, you know, around observability, around security, um, way more richer and professional. And then in terms of, um, you know, another project that's very exciting and the whole space is super exciting, is secure supply chain right in itself boring, right? But what's happening right now is just, it's amazing to see, right?

Customers, you know, downloading it just from the internet, it used to be a thing in the past. Um, you know, I've tried to work on this in previous jobs, um, and with, um, SUSE application collection, right? We're actually providing customers with a way so that they can do this in a secure way.

A lot of people are using and building their business applications out of the thousands and thousands of CNCF applications that are out there, the cloud native applications. Well, this Is the repo issue, right? Exactly.

Correct. Exactly. And now, you know, suse over it's plus 30 years of history, right?

Like we, we know how to build software securely, you know, with good attestation. And so we're moving this now to a cloud native space so that you can actually as a business owner, right, um, um, take those LA building blocks, right. And create value out of it without having to worry about updates and maintenance.

So, you know, I'm super excited to be working with AWS on that I Should mention a little before. 'cause we, we've been talking about that one all day. Not only, so the, not only are the, uh, the, uh, in the repo are the applications sort of repackaged, scanned for vulnerabilities, you know, secured, but they're also right sized, right?

A lot of package, a lot of the stuff in the packages that are extraneous and not used are stripped out. So the size of the package is a fraction of what you may get, you know, on GitHub or somewhere. And, and that's important in a world where we worry about finops, where we worry about resource data center resources, electricity and cooling, and, and, and that kind of load.

Yep. Right? We wanna be more efficient, we wanna be secure.

And that, I think is a big part of that. Suse DevX Yeah. As, as they spoke about today and very, very exciting.

Yeah. And of course, security observability built in. Um, tell you, as I sit here listening to the three of you though, something that strikes me as to, I think maybe going to the heart of your partnership and what it's been successful is sort of a common approach to, Hey, we offer soup to nuts, right?

We offer the whole thing, but at any point in the road, if you wanna pull out EKS and put in something else, or you wanna, you know, wanna not use s or, or, or rancher, but you still wanna use observability, you can do that. It's that yeah. Choice again, back to choice happens.

It's that choice that AWS it's, it's a tenant of your approach and it's key to the CER approach too. And I, if I, you know, in closing up, I'd say that's where a lot of this partnership, a lot of that common culture approach to it is, is together for people watching at home will say, Hey, I'd like to find out obviously the AWS marketplace, but I wanna find out more about SUSE solutions on AWS you know, should they go to the marketplace right away? com first?

What, what, what's the right place to do here? What's the right thing? The right, Well, either one works, right?

Marketplace, I just wanna be realistic, right? Like it's a huge catalog, right? Test them into the success that AWS has created, right?

com right? And then, you know, find your way there and you get expert help right there, right? Then, you know, if you want to learn more about those offerings, but you're not limited to just going to SUSE's website, right?

Yes. We have literally hundreds of thousands of, uh, listings from partners like suse, uh, but we have a pretty good search function. You can simply type in suse and you can even filter by write it suse, right?

Like you could see all of their listings. And, and the cool thing about, um, the cool thing about Marketplace is we now have all of SUSE's cloud ready products listed on really s market. Oh yeah.

It's available in 26 countries. Uh, and AWS marketplace makes it easy in terms of procurement, right? It is a single, single stop shop for a customer.

Um, they get to tap into their cloud spend. They don't have to go through an arduous procurement process of, of getting their, you know, their buyer, make sure that it's going through it. But all of the, all of the complexity is handled right now we have, now we even introduce financing mosh, really, right?

In AWS marketplace. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Equivalency Bank does the financing for the customer. Yeah. So SUSE gets paid right away, but the customer can choose to finance that transaction.

So that's available. But if the customer, much like, um, you know, a lot of customers in Europe, they prefer to go through a partner. We figured that out as well.

Right now we have a channel partner private offer program where suse basically authorizes, they've already onboarded 90 plus channel, partner, partner, uh, really partner, yeah. UX that actually last year. And we, um, this, at this SUSE con, we launched one for msp.

So all our cloud native products, all our SaaS offerings are available for MSPs now. So that's, we're just continuing to develop more of the ecosystem and just, you know, be able to share a lot of the innovation that we were doing. Yeah.

And the approach is like, let's try to make this as easy frictionless as possible, not just on like a seller perspective, but from a customer procurement perspective. Yeah. And we even have this multi-product listing by suse, where you could bundle all of SUSE's products into a single product offers.

That's really nice. Like multi, I was multi-channel in there now. Very nice guys.

Thank you all. I know it's, it's kind of late in the day and it's been a crazy long day. I heard there's a party at the pool tonight though.

Wow. There is. Maybe.

Yeah. It's been a long day, but I'll try. But you know what, it's, it's great to hear what's going on with AWS and Souse and how strong and vital this partnership is.

Resilient. And, uh, best of luck with it, man, going forward. Excellent.

Thank you. Very, thank you. Thank you very.

I think that's gonna wrap up if you're watching this at home, well, this isn't live. This is the end of our first day or second day coverage here at socom. We'll be back with more.

You'll be able to catch it on text on tv. Over now. This is Alan Shimo.

Have a great day everyone.