KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 | Peter Smails, SUSE

Clips
More from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026

Peter Smails

GM of Cloud Native

SUSE

play_circle_outline From Linux Vendor to Open Infrastructure Leader: SUSE AI Platform and Losant Edge IoT Acquisition

play_circle_outline SUSE Rancher Prime: Liz Orchestrator and Natural‑Language Agent Automation for Hardened, Extensible Infrastructure Management

play_circle_outline SUSE Virtualization: VMware Alternative with MIG vGPU, Virtual Clusters, Auto-Balancing, Live Micro‑Storage and Sovereignty

Info
Transcript

Peter Smails, SUSE

Peter Smails

GM of Cloud Native SUSE

In this interview from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Amsterdam, Peter Smails, general manager of cloud native at SUSE, joins theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and Paul Nashawaty to discuss how SUSE is evolving beyond its Linux roots into a full-stack open infrastructure platform for AI, containerized and virtualized workloads. Smails unpacks three announcements headlining the show: a reimagined SUSE Rancher Prime featuring Liz, an AI orchestrator that now coordinates a crew of context-aware agents across storage, security, observability and fleet management through n... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

How would SUSE describe itself and its primary areas of focus as a company? add

What are the AI-related updates and capabilities in the latest SUSE Rancher Prime release, including changes to the "Liz" assistant and how it integrates with other systems? add

What needs to happen for SUSE to realize its ambitions of becoming the modern VMware alternative and providing a unified platform for managing virtual machines and containers? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Peter Smails, SUSE

search

>> Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU live in Amsterdam. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and I am alongside Paul Nashawaty, a principal analyst at CUBE Research. We are joined by Peter Smails, GM of Cloud Native at SUSE. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

>> Thanks for having me. I always love doing this. It's my favorite part of the day.

>> It's not your first radio rodeo-

>> No, this not my first rodeo, for sure. But it's always fun to be here, so thanks for having me.

>> I mean, every single vendor here at KubeCon this week has an AI story, but I want you to start by telling us SUSE's AI story and what makes your platform different.

>> Goodness. Well, let me start with some overall context because I think a lot of people still misperceive who SUSE actually is. "They're a Linux company," or, "They're an OS company." SUSE is not the company everybody thinks it is. I mean, we're nothing short of the open infrastructure platform for modern workloads. And what does that mean? It means that we're leaders in the underlying operating system stuff, which is what everybody knows us for. We're also leaders in container management, sort of the key orchestration layer for modern workloads. We're leaders in virtualization, which is a foundational layer for modern infrastructure, but then we're also leaders in things like SUSE AI, which is essentially a turnkey platform for securely governing and running AI workloads. It's open, it's flexible, it's secure and governed. That's kind of our pitch for SUSE AI. We're also leaders in edge. You guys probably heard, and I'm sure you did some great coverage. We recently purchased a company called Losant, which is leaders in IoT. We're really cutting things down, just cutting edge in that front, no pun intended. I guess my answer initially is just making sure that all the listeners out there just to understand fundamentally that SUSE is not just a old-school Linux company. We are an open-infra company. We're leading the open-infra charge, and we see ourselves as the future for modern workloads. That's the net of it. And there's a lot, obviously, to break down in that, but that's really the mission that we want people to understand that we're on.

>> Peter, absolutely. And I know that I hear that quite a bit. It's like, "Oh, SUSE does just OS." No, I know you do a lot more than that. It's fantastic-

>> And we never miss an opportunity to let people know that.

>> That's awesome. All right. We're at KubeCon, and we're here in Europe. There's a lot of announcements that's coming out. We're talking about automation infrastructure. We're talking about AI operations. Where do you want to start with this? There's so much to talk about. Walking by the booth, it's crazy busy.

>> It is.

>> What's happening?

>> No, we're having a good show. It's always a good show for us. Ever since all the way back to the Rancher days, it's always been a fun space. I would touch on three things, I think, for today, just to sort of put a fine point on it because there's always so much going on. We're at GTC. This week, the focus really is kind of that middle layer, cloud native, essentially what we do with our SUSE Rancher Prime platform and SUSE Virtualization. I'd say we start there, and then we can jump around and do other things. But essentially, three sort of key pieces of news or information that we want everybody taking away from this week. The first is the latest SUSE Rancher Prime. SUSE Rancher Prime is built on the open-source Rancher community edition. This is the hardened commercial edition of Rancher. And the big news there is, wait for it, AI. And to your question before about sort of what's SUSE's AI story, context on that one is I think we have a very unique approach, which is, number one, we see using AI for intelligent infrastructure. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about. How do you use AI the way it should be used to make your infrastructure management as intelligent as it can be? We'll talk about that. The other piece is it's being the right infrastructure for running AI workloads. That's the domain of SUSE AI. That we're teasing now. We'll talk more about that at SUSECON, which I'll put a plug in at the end. But the news for Rancher Prime this week is very straightforward. Liz was our original assistant. What we've done is we've completely changed the architecture. Now, Liz is the orchestrator of a crew of intelligent context-aware agents. Storage. Security. Observability. Virtualization. Fleet management. Rancher management. You can do super intelligent things like, "Tell me my security posture. Automatically update, patch those from AppCo, and then do a rolling deployment," all through natural language. It's using AI to make automation of Kubernetes management, still through the Rancher interface, highly intelligent, lower cognitive load, et cetera. What makes it exceptionally cool is that, because we're open, that's what we are, if customers have their own agents that they want to bring in to the fray, they can bring ... Let's say they have a ticketing system or something internally. They can bring that in. Liz can actually then provide through a singular interface, making Rancher the infrastructure management platform that much more intelligent. It's very ecosystem driven, very extensible, very context-aware. We're excited about that and getting a ton of positive feedback. That's the first piece of news.

>> Well, I have to tell you, with regards to Liz, let me react on that because I think ... And we're at this developer show. It's pretty much an app dev show. What Liz is doing and with the MCP servers around SUSE Virtualization, it's really helping with the developer experience.

>> Absolutely.

>> It's allowing that modernization step to kind of meet the developers where they are in their journey and also allowing for that progression between heritage environments to new, modernized purchases. That's where I think I wouldn't understand -

>> No, no, let's talk about ... The third bucket, which it doesn't matter what the order is, let's talk about the developer stuff. We announced what we call developer access. If you remember last year in the fall, we originally announced Rancher Developer Access. What that is is a marriage between sort of product-led growth, open source, Rancher Desktop, which has an enormous community. It's a developer desktop based on Rancher. Super popular open source. What we did was we married, we created, an interface between that and AppCo, SUSE Application Collection, which is our curated library of secure apps, zero-CBE applications. What we've now announced in the spring to drive further adoption of this ... And AppCo is a SaaS. What we've done is we've created essentially a no-cost tier of application collection. We're giving users of Rancher Desktop the ability to get all the base container images, things like Postgres, redis, and a bunch of other key open-source developer platforms, if you will, or software, and they can have direct access from Rancher Desktop to have secure images. We're pushing the whole thing left. There's a very strong story around what we're doing to push everything as far left, put as much control into the developer's hands as we can. That's the latest for developer access. And then to shift gears one last time, the third piece from an infra standpoint on SUSE Virtualization, which is also ... Broadcom has created this massive market change, and so everybody is looking for modernization. Our position is that we feel we can be nothing short of being the modern VMware alternative. Not to be a like-for-like replacement. But what people want, what customers want, is they want a unified platform for managing VMs that aren't going away forever, but they want a unified experience. They want a unified platform for managing VMs and containers. I don't want my legacy management of UI over here and then my modern stuff. Even I throw it in one big package and try to make it cheap. They want the right solution, which is what SUSE Virtualization is. It is fundamentally the underlying virtualization for open infrastructure. We introduced MIG support. That was news this week. You support the virtual GPUs. We did auto-balancing. We added live micro-storage migration. Everything we need to be doing to keep expanding the use cases that we can support. And what's fascinating from a market dynamic, very briefly, is that a lot of organizations, as you know, they re-up with Broadcom because they had to, so they have anywhere from a one-and-a-half to four or five-year migration strategy, but they're investing in the modern platform. We're working with all of these customers. It's going to take them a couple of years. They may have hundreds of thousands of VMs, some of which they're going to keep. It's a fascinating story there around what's happening with SUSE Virtualization. And last thing, I forgot to mention this notion of virtual clusters, which you're probably familiar with. That's our ability to provision multiple virtual clusters from one physical. We've now made sure that that works directly with the MIG stuff as well. You can take a virtual GPU infrastructure, overlay that with a virtual cluster infrastructure for ridiculously high density, which is also good for developers because you can carve it up, give them access to these resources in a very effective way.

>> What you've just described is incredibly complex, ambitious, exciting. The organizations you were talking about, just even on the VMware conversation, it sounds very complicated and also messy. What has to go right for SUSE to realize all of its ambitions about being-

>> I don't usually do this on the queue, but I'll take issue with your comments.

>> All right.

>> You're not contending that the SUSE solution is messy. You're saying that the market situation with the customer-

>> Yes. No, no, no, not-

>> Just making sure there-...

>> you. I'm just saying that organizations-

>> Just clarifying question.

>> No, are dealing with a lot of different just contracts that are binding, different kinds of environments, ways that workers are accustomed to working. Change is hard, as we all know. I'm wondering, from your perspective, what has to go right for SUSE to be able to realize its ambitions?

>> I think, well, let's separate that between what we control and what we don't control. What we do control, obviously, continued execution against our mission and our strategy. I mean, stating the obvious. Making the right investments. Continuing to do the right things. Being customer led. Executing. I think what needs to go right is, quite honestly, largely the market continues to unfold the way that it unfolds. And again, that's out of our control, but we're not dictating that 90% of organizations are now using Kubernetes and containers in production-ready environments. We didn't create that, but that's obviously ... If people stop modernizing, that wouldn't be good for SUSE, so we need people to continue modernizing. It's not in our control, but that's what people are doing. In any of the latest research, people are increasingly modernizing, so we need to continue to see that unfold because people want unification, so that needs to continue to unfold. And this is not hubris at all. It's just there's a very interesting sort of strategic alignment with what SUSE is trying to accomplish and what we believe our mission is and what's happening with the market. I know this is outside the scope for today's discussion, but sovereignty, for example, is another thing that's unfolding. Very, very important topic. We're unbelievably well positioned as a company. The VMware modernization. We're incredibly well positioned. The overall modernization to cloud native. These are all core pillars of the strategy. If the market naturally continues to unfold the way that all indications would be, that's certainly a strong bellwether for SUSE.

>> I mean, obviously you're super passionate about this. It's really cool. I think it's interesting. You're spot on. Sovereignty is where it's the right place to be talking about it. We're in Europe, right?

>> That's true.

>> It's definitely where we should be talking about it. But look, I mean, I think that when you look at monetization is a treadmill, we know that's going to continue to happen. You don't want to stop. That's going to continue to grow. The path of getting there to where you're at today versus where you go tomorrow, there's a lot that you've talked about in the last 10 minutes, but I think if we want to sum it up into the key three points that you want to sum it up, what are the three things that you would ... Because I know that tech stack is important to kind of call out here. And again, SUSE is not a one-trick pony. It has a whole slew of things to do. I know Rancher is a big part of it. Rancher Prime is a big part of it, but so isn't the AI piece, so isn't the security pieces, so isn't the ... You name it. You mentioned Losant, the new-

>> I can sum that up. We talked a lot of different pieces, but I would bring it back to where we started, which is for folks. It's important I think for folks to understand, number one, what our vision is and what we're trying to accomplish, and so that they can align that with what their ambitions are. But then to your point about how you get there, think open, think open, think open, whether that's open source, whether that's open infrastructure because if you look, the key thing is it is a journey. Customers want choice. They want flexibility. What are the underpinnings of that? Open source is one of the core pillars of that. Continue to focus on open sources as an underlying technology base. And number two is, whatever you do from a vendor standpoint, focus on openness because it's what puts control into the hands of the customer, not in the control of the vendor. It's hard to be open. It's a ton of work, but it's something we're incredibly proud of. All of these pieces work in concert to deliver an open-infra platform that puts control in the customer's hands and gives them the modernization platform but also path to get there. How's that for summation?

>> That's fantastic. And we're here at KubeCon, a final shoutout to your conference coming up-

>> Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I would've forgotten that. Thank you. Yes. We have SUSECON coming up in Prague in late April. I can't remember exactly when it is. That's our annual show. Super fun. If you're not already registered-

>> 21st....

>> we'd love to have you come. And you guys will be there, so that's going to be fun. We'll do lots more interviews. Looking forward to that.

>> Excellent. Well, you were a burst of energy to close us out, so I really appreciate that, Peter.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you so much.

>> Thanks for having me. I love being here. Appreciate it.

>> Always fun. Always a pleasure having you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Nashawaty. That wraps up day one of theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon. Check us back here tomorrow for more. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.