This article is more than 1 year old

Hardening in the enterprise: SUSE releases Rancher 2.6.5 and NeuVector 5.0

Still a 'nimble idea factory' under the gaze of the Chameleon

Kubecon SUSE acquisition Rancher is growing up, with a decidedly enterprise-friendly 2.6.5 release and version 5.0 of NeuVector.

SUSE appears to be increasingly becoming the container company, and used this year's EU Kubecon event to make its first release of NeuVector since it open-sourced the container security platform earlier this year.

Dubbed a "Full Lifecycle Container Security Platform", NeuVector turning up with Rancher is further evidence of an increased folding in of security and scanning into container solutions.

A SUSE insider described NeuVector is a "big deal" and noted Docker's exploits in the arena of container hardening. Greg Muscarella, general manager of enterprise container management at SUSE said the tool will "enable enterprises to strengthen their security against growing cyber threats in any location without compromising developer agility and innovation."

NeuVector's open-source project, Open Zero Trust (OZT), has also been contributed to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF.)

It is, however, Rancher 2.6.5 that is most interesting. NeuVector integration notwithstanding, the new release of the Kubernetes management platform features General Availability of RKE2 (SUSE's Kubernetes distribution) and the ability to isolate Prometheus metrics between projects. A graduated project at CNCF, Prometheus is a handy monitoring system and time series database.

RKE2 adds support for Windows, including Server 2022, and a vSphere driver to provision directly into a virtualized environment. "Alongside experimental GMSA [Group Managed Service Accounts] tooling, .NET applications can now maintain security best practices in container environments," according to SUSE.

Or, as a SUSE source put it: "With GMSA in tech preview, our Windows containers can do stuff on active directory that simply isn't supported .NET Core on Linux."

The release is a sign of Rancher maturing following its acquisition by SUSE. While some of its founders have been absorbed into the SUSE machine (although we're rather fond of former CTO Darren Shepherd's LinkedIn description as "Container Has-Been" following his departure from SUSE earlier this year) others, such as Muscarella, have been brought in.

While enough of Rancher remains to qualify as a "nimble idea factory" as our SUSE source put it, today's release is a further indicator that the platform is eying increasingly complex enterprise workloads. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like