Paul Nashawaty of theCUBE Research interviews Sudeep Goswami of Traefik Labs, chief executive officer and Troy Topnik of SUSE, director of product management for Rancher Partners and Ecosystems, at SUSECON 2026. The conversation explores migration strategies, networking and artificial intelligence sovereignty, including ingress controllers, Kubernetes distributions, SUSE Virtualization and Rancher management for virtualization and edge computing.
Goswami describes an expanded SUSE-Traefik partnership to support K3s and RKE2 and explains how Traefik serves as a unified ingress from edge to enterprise. They emphasize governance and present a multidimensional AI sovereignty maturity model to guide enterprise adoption and data sovereignty efforts.
Topnik highlights an architectural approach to migration modernization and transformation and underscores Rancher’s unified user interface for managing virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters. They discuss strategies to reduce networking complexity and to accelerate modernization at scale.
Nashawaty observes the rising importance of networking and guides the discussion on practical factors to consider for enterprise migration and virtualization. The episode provides actionable insights for organizations pursuing Kubernetes adoption, edge modernization and data sovereignty.
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Troy Topnik, SUSE & Sudeep Goswami, Traefik Labs
Paul Nashawaty of theCUBE Research interviews Sudeep Goswami of Traefik Labs, chief executive officer and Troy Topnik of SUSE, director of product management for Rancher Partners and Ecosystems, at SUSECON 2026. The conversation explores migration strategies, networking and artificial intelligence sovereignty, including ingress controllers, Kubernetes distributions, SUSE Virtualization and Rancher management for virtualization and edge computing.
Goswami describes an expanded SUSE-Traefik partnership to support K3s and RKE2 and explains how Traefik serves as a unified ingress from edge to enterprise. They emphasize governance and present a multidimensional AI sovereignty maturity model to guide enterprise adoption and data sovereignty efforts.
Topnik highlights an architectural approach to migration modernization and transformation and underscores Rancher’s unified user interface for managing virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters. They discuss strategies to reduce networking complexity and to accelerate modernization at scale.
Nashawaty observes the rising importance of networking and guides the discussion on practical factors to consider for enterprise migration and virtualization. The episode provides actionable insights for organizations pursuing Kubernetes adoption, edge modernization and data sovereignty.
Director of Product Management, Rancher Partners & EcosystemsSUSE
Sudeep Goswami
CEOTraefik Labs
In this interview from SUSECON 2026 in Prague, Troy Topnik, director of product management, Rancher partners and ecosystems at SUSE, joins Sudeep Goswami, chief executive officer of Traefik Labs, to talk with theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty about how open-source infrastructure is enabling enterprises to navigate migration, modernization and AI transformation. Topnik and Goswami open by discussing the expanded SUSE-Traefik partnership, which now extends Traefik beyond its role as the default ingress controller for K3S at the edge to RKE2, creating a consiste...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
Can you describe the partnership with Traefik and explain what the expansion to include RK2 (in addition to K3S) means?add
Why do enterprises now consider networking more critical to their business goals than they did two years ago?add
How should organizations approach migrating workloads off VMware (vSphere/NSX) and replacing Ingress NGINX at scale?add
How close to home should my data, vendor, and software supply chain be, particularly when deploying AI (and what are the options for keeping AI workloads on-premises to maintain control)?add
>> And welcome back to SUSECON 2026. My name is Paul Nashawaty. I'm the Practice Lead and Principal Analyst at TheCUBE Research. I'm here today with Troy Topnick from SUSE and Sudeep Goswami from Traefik Labs. How are you doing, guys?
Sudeep Goswami
>> Great. How are you?
Paul Nashawaty
>> Very good.
Troy Topnik
>> Doing good.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Very good. Well, exciting times. There's a lot happening here at SUSECON. The show floor is busy. The keynotes was busy. Lots happening, but let's start with SUSE and Traefik. The partnerships is a big area here that we see a lot of, no pun intended, traffic going through, but let's start there. Sudeep, let's start with the partnership and talk there.
Sudeep Goswami
>> Yeah. I'm really excited to be here. We are expanding our partnership. We've had a longstanding partnership already, where Traefik is the default ingress for K3S in the edge, but now we're expanding that to now also include Traefik with RK2. So, now from the edge to the enterprise, you can have a consistent unified layer. So, we're very excited about the partnership.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Troy, anything to add about the partnership?
Troy Topnik
>> Yeah. Well, as Sudeep mentioned, this goes way back with K3S needing a compact and well maintained ingress controller for K3S, our lightweight Kubernetes distribution. So, that's been in place for a while. And then it was KubeCon last year, when people ... We knew this was coming, but it caught a lot of people by surprise. The Ingress NGINX ingress controller was being deprecated, which left a lot of people panicking and looking for something. And we knew that we had to go talk. And so, Matt Farina and I went to talk to you at your booth and say, "We've got to sort this out for our customers, because they need a good migration path away from what they've been using for years, to a solution they can use."
Paul Nashawaty
>> Absolutely. And Sudeep, you and I, of course, we've been talking about this for quite some time. KubeCon North America, we were on at KubeCon EU recently. So, there's definitely a lot of content to look at. But let's talk about the three challenges. I mean, when we look at the three challenges that this is really addressing and challenges that we want to look at, monetization, migration, and transformation are really the areas I think people are looking at. Now, regardless of where people are in their journey, they could be fully mature and go, "Okay, we just need a replacement," or they could be just starting out on something. What do you recommend? And how do you recommend people either get started or just figure out where they're going to move to next?
Sudeep Goswami
>> Yeah. And that's what we're hearing from customers is these three arcs of the journey, if you will. There's the migration arc, the modernization arc, and the transformation arc. The reality is most enterprises are having to deal with all three at once. But as you said, they're at different stages in the journey. Some may be just on the migration path, some may be on the monetization, some may be on the transformation. The approach that we're seeing customers take is an architectural approach, which is lay the architecture down first that allows you to seamlessly go from one to the other. And I think that's what we have been working with SUSE on, is putting an architecture that allows customers to migrate away from, let's say, VMware to SUSE Virtualization, then continue the journey with Rancher, with Kubernetes, and then also integrate AI into the mix.
Paul Nashawaty
>> I think that makes sense. I mean, Troy, we've seen in our research that 94% of enterprises say that networking is more critical to business goals than just two years ago. Why is that the case?
Troy Topnik
>> Because it's hard.
Paul Nashawaty
>> It's hard. Well, that's true.
Troy Topnik
>> It's really complicated. I mean, I know I've been working with the SUSE Virtualization team over the last few months. And we just introduced Kube-OVN into that product. And getting the level of network flexibility that things like vSphere have had for years and the virtualization products have had for years into the Kubernetes world is a tough job. And we've fortunately got great stable APIs to work with in the Kubernetes ecosystem to build these ends. Swapping in an ingress controller is something that you can do. The Gateway API is something that you can use. So, I don't know if that answered the question, quite.
Paul Nashawaty
>> I think it does. Yeah. No, I think it does. I mean, you said, "Well, I think I'll start with how you simplify." You started, "It's hard." And I think what I see from my research is complexity and skill gap are the two challenges that people need to overcome.
Troy Topnik
>> And the finesse is in making a product that can make it easy for a user to consume that complexity.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Absolutely.
Troy Topnik
>> And that's what we're trying to do.
Paul Nashawaty
>> And what we see is 67% of organizations are hiring generalists over specialists. And what those organizations are doing is they're pushing back on vendors to reduce the complexity. But Sudeep, I want to come back to the migration front. You mentioned this. How are you seeing organizations approach both VMware migration and shift away from ingress here?
Sudeep Goswami
>> Yeah. It goes back to an architectural approach, where before the whole Ingress NGINX migration even came up as a topic, what people are really grappling with was VMware migration. How do they move away from vSphere and NSX and all of that to a different platform? So, now they have to deal with that plus an ingress. The only way to solve this at scale is through architecture. You have to standardize on an architecture. Ingress being a big part of that, networking plays a huge part, because that's the glue that ties it all together. Not just at the layer three level, but all the way at the application level at layer seven. So, you have to think of this, holistically, layer three, all the way to layer seven at an architecture approach. So, whether you're moving workloads from VMware, whether you're migrating away from Ingress NGINX, whether you're transforming with AI or you're modernizing, this is the answer and this is what we are hearing from customers as well.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah. Well, I absolutely appreciate this. I mean, I have a colleague, Bob. He focuses on networking. And I always kind of joke with him, saying like, "Networking's the plumbing. It's just the plumbing. It just works." I focus predominantly on app dev, so I look at the business logic up. But Troy, we see that 86% of enterprises are in the middle of a significant or full network redesign to support these monetization efforts that Sudeep's talking about. As enterprises are moving into monetization, how are they managing the coexistence of VMs and containers without adding the level of complexity?
Troy Topnik
>> Well, they have to deal with necessary complexity, but they don't want to add unnecessary complexity. And it's tricky because containers and VMs are different. They have a different boundary. They have different security considerations and Kubernetes will treat VMs as pods. But you don't necessarily want to be running your containers and pods on the same Kubernetes, without taking some things into consideration, like the fact that KubeVirt has a very specialized way of dealing with pods that contain virtual machines. We've developed an interesting way to bridge this gap on SUSE Virtualization, which is to introduce virtual clusters, the K3K project that SUSE has put out there in the world. And this sort of insulates the host Kubernetes cluster from the guest cluster, essentially, that is running in these with K3K. So, that's one way. And that sounded really complicated. And the gist of your question is, how do we protect customers who might not want to deal with that complexity from facing that? And it comes down to UI, and documentation, and proceduralizing how you do that, and creating an architecture that makes it clear where your containers are, where you're-
Paul Nashawaty
>> What I heard you say, and what I've been seeing and witnessing in the show floor here is you have a harmonized environment that allows you to have a UI that allows that for that management. That's what I heard you say. And I mean, tell me if I'm wrong.
Troy Topnik
>> That is what we're trying to do with Rancher, the fact that you can drive your harvester or SUSE Virtualization clusters and your bare metal RKE2 clusters with the same UI. And I think you did a really good job. We wrote this blog post that we just released about the architecture, that shows both of these things in parallel. And how you can design something that does both, and gets you on this migration path from a virtual machine mindset into a cloud native mindset.
Paul Nashawaty
>> That sounds like a great read. I think that the audience should read that. Absolutely, because I mean, it's definitely top of mind for a lot of organizations. Sudeep, I want to shift over for you with regards to AI, since we're kind of moving into that direction here. 28% of organizations are already running agentic ops. We see that. We also see that 39% or more are planning to move within the next 12 months. This is also complemented with 60% say that they have a trusted and validated time to bring on, deploy agentic AI in production. Because I know it's hard for me to say that, but that's basically what they're trying to do. But when it comes to transformation, how do you see AI, particularly with agentic workflows, moving from experimentation to real production? I see that the year of 2025 was about experimentation and implementation. I'm sorry, experimentation and innovation. '26 is about the year of implementation. What are your thoughts?
Sudeep Goswami
>> Yeah. This is where you need a strong governance layer. And that's the key unlock that we are seeing enterprises, the ones that are really successful in operationalizing AI and moving into production, is they have built a strong governance layer. And what does governance really bring? It's a consistent set of policies and a runtime layer that allow you to know what is happening, be able to observe it, and be able to protect it. So, think of going back to architecture. If you have a consistent architecture that allows you to migrate VMs, allow you to modernize to containers and allow you to run AI, now you can have a consistent observability plane through which you can see what's happening. You understand, let's say, the air conditions or the boundary conditions and you're able to enforce them in real time.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think that having that unified approach, unified control plane, and understanding having the full optics across it from an observability perspective allows for you to have actionable insights as you need to move forward, especially when you start looking at that transform layer. And this also does kind of align to... I think it's appropriate to bring up, we're here in Europe, data sovereignty. We look at data sovereignty, when you look at things like the EU compliance or EU CRA that's going into effect, compliance regulations and governance needs to be thought about, moving away from certain hyperscalers to having data in region. Troy, let's start there. 62% of organizations say regulatory requirements, they really drive direct impacts for AI inference and data, localized versus centralized. So, that's an interesting kind of perspective. What are your thoughts on that?
Troy Topnik
>> Well, it's interesting because SUSE's got a whole team devoted to sovereignty now. And addressing primarily the European market that is more concerned about data sovereignty, has always been concerned more about data sovereignty than other global parts of the market. We're seeing the same thing in Canada now. So, I'm from Canada. And SUSE's all around the world and we're noticing in the field an increased interest, not just in AI, just in terms of where your data is and where your data center is, and what software you're running, and where you get the software that you're running in that data center. So, it's just forcing everyone to reevaluate, if things change again, because the world has been changing in the last six months radically, and if things change again, how close to home is my data? How close to home is my vendor? How close to home is my software supply chain? That applies to AI as much as it does to everything else. And I think SUSE had a lot of foresight in focusing our AI efforts into being able to run AI yourself on prem, in a data center in your country, this sort of thing, as opposed to buying it from a US SaaS provider. So, working in conjunction with Traefik, we can get even more specific about control over how that data is accessed. And you might want to talk a little more about that.
Sudeep Goswami
>> Yeah. So, I would even expand this to be more than data sovereignty. We just published a maturity model for AI sovereignty, looking at this broadly speaking. So, data sovereignty obviously is a very, very important step in there. But to achieve true sovereignty, you need to look at many different dimensions. And that's what this blog that we published and the maturity model really talks about. It's AI sovereignty is multidimensional. You have to think about where's your control plane running. Where's your data plane running? These policies that you're writing, where are they stored? Can you export them easily? Can you version control them? And then you talk about the guardrails that you've put for agentic AI. Where are those guardrails actually happening? Are they happening in the cloud? Are they happening in your prem of choice? And then you have to think about, if you're going to move from one hyperscaler to another or one environment to another, what are the pieces that you have to rearchitect versus the pieces that you can just lift and shift? The more of the lift and shift capabilities that you have, the more in sovereign you are. It's a spectrum. It's not a binary zero or one. To achieve true AI sovereignty, it's a spectrum of capabilities, a spectrum of dimensions, and that's what we've just published. So, it's a good way for people to internalize where they are. And the key insight is this. You could be, let's say, truly sovereign on one dimension, but not on other. And that's going to become your anchor point. You could be, let's say, level five sovereign on control plane. But if your policies are still going to the cloud where they're getting enforced, that you're not level five sovereign. You're still at a lower level.
Paul Nashawaty
>> I read this blog, this maturity model that you have. And what I really like about it is, depending on where the reader is and their journey, they can enter to any stage of the journey. So, they can enter in pillar one, pillar two, or all the way up to pillar five. So, even if you're fully mature and you need to have an understanding of this, you can still get a lot out of understanding whether this works. Well, Sudeep, this has been great. Troy, thank you for being here. Sudeep, thank you very much. Always a pleasure having you on. It's been great having you on TheCUBE.
Troy Topnik
>> Thank you, Paul.
Sudeep Goswami
>> Thank you. Cheers.
Paul Nashawaty
>> And thank you for watching. Paul Nashawaty coming to you live from SUSECON 2026 here, live in Prague from TheCUBE, your leading source of tech news.
Paul Nashawaty