Open source at the edge. An interview with SUSE CTO Thomas Di Giacomo

Di Giacomo talks about the IoT, Kubernetes, Linux and the importance of continuing to support legacy tech while venturing towards new horizons

SUSE was one of the very first companies to build a business around Linux; Red Hat was another. Unlike Red Hat, snapped last year up by IBM, SUSE, which has also spent periods of its 28-year history subsumed by other organisations, is currently independent, Micro Focus having decided to sell it a couple of years back.

CTO Thomas Di Giacomo seems to be enjoying SUSE's current unattached status. We spoke to him after he'd delivered a presentation at a CNCF event last month. He was not able to go into detail about the company's recent purchase of cloud native startup Rancher as the process was still ongoing. The interview is edited for brevity.

Computing: The status of open source software has obviously changed hugely since the early days of Linux. How has SUSE changed with it?

Thomas Di Giacomo: Well the big difference is it's not about Linux any more. Linux is really the base technology for many, many things, from virtualisation to containers, public cloud applications virtualisation as well as edge computing.

What hasn't changed at SUSE is that everything we're doing is based on open source technologies. So, we haven't changed what we were doing with Linux, but we're doing it for all the solutions we're bringing to our customers, whether it's around, storage, or container management technologies, everything is open source.

Open source was something pretty new 28 years ago [when SUSE started], and today it's being used and adopted by pretty much everybody. I would even argue that all the innovation today is coming from open source. Even companies that weren't open source while ago like Microsoft are very invested and very involved in open source technologies, also Facebook, AWS, Google and others.

With all those companies now engaged in open source how does SUSE fit in?

Well, I'd say we are true open source in the way that we put things together for our customers. We're not trying to tell them ‘you need to use these technologies from SUSE'. We're trying to embrace the diversity of their needs and the investments they've done in the past. They don't have to use SUSE Linux. If they are running another Linux they can still use the management component from SUSE technologies, they can use virtualisation from somebody else, they can use containers from somebody else.

Another thing is today we are completely independent. So we are not part of a big hardware company. We're the largest independent open source company today.

Also, from the very beginning we have been focused on mission-critical enterprise workloads. So things that cannot stop. That's why we are very strong with SAP. We're also extremely flexible in terms of collaboration, so we're doing engineering with a lot of customers and partners, and when I say partners that's HPE, Fujitsu, Huawei, Dell and also cloud partners like Microsoft Azure. We are developing optimised Linux for Azure with Microsoft. So I think we're more flexible than our friends in the competition.

What did you make of IBM's decision to buy Red Hat?

I think IBM is trying to grow its cloud business and OpenShift can help them with hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is also something that we are seeing today. Most companies have a mix of on-prem data and cloud and it might make sense to run your analytics on one cloud, your applications and your business itself on different clouds.

Why the rush for hybrid cloud?

In the technology industry we are very good at creating new solutions, but it's becoming harder and harder for companies to manage their legacy or existing technology with the new stuff. We have containers now, but they're not replacing virtual machines; we have public cloud, but companies still need to have IT on-prem and at the edge. So we have to help companies to deal with all the complexity and make the best out of what they have already.

You spoke in your talk about the growing importance of the edge - meaning compute that's not in a data centre or the cloud, so connected cars, smart devices and so on - and the suitability of cloud native technologies for this environment. What are people using now?

People are pragmatic, they are using a lot of different things at the edge, and they are doing that with - without wanting to sound negative - legacy things. [Retailers] may have compute in their shops but are missing integration with their regional data centres, or with services in public cloud. That's what cloud native technologies like K3S can bring as a common platform for your edge.

K3S is now a CNCF Sandbox project and that's big news because K3S is the first one that's a Kubernetes distribution. We're very excited about that because many more other people will contribute. Open source is great, but you need to make sure that the open source technologies are not driven by a single company.

We've been [helping to simplify working in diverse IT environments] for quite a while with Linux, and Rancher is doing that very well with containerised apps. So that's actually why we've done that deal with Rancher.

What's the difference between OpenStack, which you were a member of until last year, and Cloud Foundry and CNCF in which you are active now?

We've been involved with OpenStack since the very beginning, and we've contributed a lot. We still have customers on OpenStack and we're still supporting them. But we announced we would not continue to develop things directly with OpenStack. The main reason is because it was quite a complex technology to operate and maintain, and we are seeing people moving more and more towards containers and Kubernetes.

Open source communities are also learning from the past. A lot of the work that has been done with OpenStack has been very critical to the new communities.

If you think about Cloud Foundry specifically, they address quite different needs. OpenStack solves infrastructure challenges and Cloud Foundry is targeting application development. Making things simple for developers.

I think there's more similarities between Kubernetes and OpenStack in a way in that Kubernetes is really focused on containers and OpenStack is more focused on traditional workloads.

You have also been working with blockchain company Tymlez on edge use cases. How does blockchain fit in to the edge?

Tymlez have a very interesting blockchain based technology, and which is running inside containers, so it's very cloud native. One particular example is for hospitals, using blockchain to make sure that MRI scan images are not being changed or corrupted by data transfer. That's just one particular use case of using blockchain technology on top of cloud native technologies.