In a statement, the company said the new version of Rancher Prime would help customers to better manage heterogeneous, multi-cloud Kubernetes deployments securely and at scale.

SUSE also released information about updates to the community edition of Rancher, SLE Micro 5.5 and the future of SUSE Edge.

“With Rancher Prime we continue our focus on enhancing customer productivity by providing a simple and secure container management experience for their entire infrastructure including data centre, multiple clouds, and the Edge,” said Peter Smails, general manager of Enterprise Container Management, SUSE.

“The release of Rancher 2.8 also demonstrates our continued commitment to our open source community users providing them with enhanced tooling and expanded Rancher extensibility.”

Rancher Prime 2.0 offers the functionality of SUSE and third-party tools within the Rancher Prime UI. New extensions include NeuVector which offers container management from operations, and management to security.

Another extension is Cluster API that streamlines cluster provisioning across multi-cloud and hybrid providers.

Also included is the Rancher Prime Application Collection which is a tech preview. It comprises a a curated library of developer and infrastructure applications. These are built and packaged with SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images backed by SUSE’s zero-trust principles and secure software supply chain security guarantees.

SUSE also announced SLE Micro 5.5, the lightweight operating system purpose-built for containerised and virtualised workloads.

Using this, users can download container and workload images from trusted registries.

The open source firm offered a demonstration of early integration for SUSE Edge, targeting the IIoT space, which will be available in 2024.

The company said in early 2024, it would will expand its partnerships for edge solutions with Buoyant,creators of the Rust-based Linkerd service mesh, and Synadia.