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Tag: SUSE

SUSE Extends AI Agent Reach via MCP Server Integration

SUSE today revealed it is collaborating with multiple providers of artificial intelligence (AI) agents with the ability to manage IT infrastructure resources via integrations with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server embedded in its platforms.

Announced at the SUSECON 2026 conference, AI agents from Fsas Technologies, n8n and Revenium, Stacklock and Amazon Web Services (AWS) can invoke the MCP server that SUSE has embedded in its Rancher Prime and SUSE Multi-Linux Manager offerings.

Rick Spencer, general manager, engineering at SUSE, said that capability makes it possible, for example, for the Amazon Quick AI agent that AWS developed to automate workflows for managing IT infrastructure resources such as Linux servers and Kubernetes clusters.

Ultimately, any AI agent that can access the SUSE MCP server should be able to, for example, identify system faults in Kubernetes clusters or Linux servers, correlate system logs, and submit a pull request (PR) or a patch to restart a service or apply updates.

The goal is to provide a secure way for AI agents to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize infrastructure across any distribution of Linux or Kubernetes using SUSE Multi-Linux Manager or the Rancher Prime management platform, said Spencer. Included in the MCP servers developed by SUSE are a set of AI engineering skills that make it possible to manage Linux servers and Kubernetes clusters, he added.

Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering at the Futurum Group, said infrastructure platforms are evolving into agent-accessible substrates. Platform evaluations must now weigh MCP surface depth alongside management features because every action exposed through MCP becomes a potential autonomous change made to a production environment, he added.

The degree to which organizations will enable AI agents to manage IT infrastructure will naturally vary by use case but it’s clear that with the advent of MCP, not every platform is going to require its own dedicated AI agent. In some instances, an AI agent developed by a third-party will simply invoke MCP to automate a task. In other instances, however, an AI agent might communicate with another AI agent that has been specifically trained to perform IT infrastructure tasks.

Regardless of approach, the days when IT teams relied on graphical tools to manage IT environments are coming to an end, said Spencer. Instead, IT teams will use natural language interfaces to instruct AI agents to perform specific tasks, he added.

In the meantime, MCP itself remains a work in progress. The next iteration of MCP will enable IT teams to deploy stateless servers that will make it easier to deploy AI tools and applications at higher levels of scale. The technical oversight committee for MCP, now being advanced under the auspices of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), is also working on a task capability that will make it easier to run long-running autonomous workflows versus continuing to rely on a request and response mechanism that would otherwise need to be re-invoked multiple times.

Additionally, maintainers of the MCP project are working on adding a triggers capability that will enable servers to initiate an action, rather than always having to rely on an MCP client. Support for retry semantics, expiration policies, native streaming and reusable skills that are based on domain knowledge are additional capabilities that are expected to be added in 2026.

Finally, updates to the Python and TypeScript software development kits (SDKs) will provide access to more efficient MCP clients and servers.

In the meantime, DevOps teams should expect the number of AI agents that can manage IT infrastructure to rapidly proliferate in the days and months ahead.

April 22, 2026
Forking RHEL! Oracle and SUSE Join the Fight ¦ Silverman Sues AI Firms

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: SUSE announces a Red Hat Enterprise Linux fork after Oracle said a similar thing, and Sarah Silverman says OpenAI and Meta have stolen her words. (more…)

July 12, 2023
DevOps Deeper Dive: SUSE Sets DevOps Course

There was a time when SUSE was considered to be the second-biggest force driving the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, after Red Hat. Then came an odyssey to rival any epic written by Homer. A few short years after moving its corporate headquarters from Germany to Oakland, California, the company was sold to Novell, which was then later acquired by Attachmate. Three years later, Attachmate was acquired by Micro Focus. Three years after that, SUSE (as an arm of Micro Focus) acquired distributions of OpenStack and the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE).

That brings us to 2018, when SUSE was spun out of Micro Focus to become an independent company once again, headquartered in Germany once again. A year later Melissa Di Donato, formerly chief operating officer (COO) of SAP, was named CEO of SUSE. A few months after that, SUSE announced it would withdraw its distribution of OpenStack from the market to focus its efforts on emerging cloud-native opportunities stemming from the rise of Kubernetes.

For SUSE, those opportunities arise from a distribution of Kubernetes deployed on its Linux operating system, which also serves as the foundation for its container-as-a-service (CaaS) environment, along with a version of Cloud Foundry deployed on top of Kubernetes.

Brent Schroeder, global CTO for SUSE, said his company’s strategy is being driven by an acute need for increased flexibility. IT environments are inherently becoming hybrid as more workloads move to the public cloud, and many organizations will want to leverage a common substrate based on Kubernetes for building and deploying applications. In some instances, Kubernetes will be deployed on top of virtual machines, while in other use cases Kubernetes will be deployed on bare-metal servers. IT organizations will then decide to deploy a CaaS or PaaS depending on their requirements, said Schroeder, noting that regardless of the path chosen, IT modernization initiatives will create a significant opportunity for SUSE.

“Virtual machines, bare-metal and the cloud will be a huge catalyst,” said Schroeder.

DevOps, of course, is playing a major role in driving those transitions, which Schroeder said has become a major focus for SUSE as organizations think through how to not just build and deploy applications faster, but also secure and govern those processes. That latest version of SUSE CaaS Platform 4, for example, added support for Cilium open source project for securing network connectivity between containerized application services.

Of course, SUSE is not the only IT vendor making this journey. Red Hat was the first to deploy a PaaS environment on top of Kubernetes and since then has been on a mission to obliterate the distinction between a CaaS and a PaaS environment. As an arm of IBM, Red Hat has also significantly expanded its market research as IBM builds out a hybrid cloud computing strategy based on the Red Hat OpenShift platform.

Of course, Red Hat’s acquisition by IBM might create new opportunities for SUSE. After all, more than a few of the IT organizations that opted to embrace Red Hat OpenShift had plenty of opportunities to consider alternatives from IBM. Now that the acquisition has been finalized, some of them may be reconsidering their options.

It’s too early to say when SUSE might arrive at its ultimate destination. When venture capitalists buy a company such as SUSE the goal is to either take the company public or recoup the investment by selling it to another entity. Whatever the outcome, it’s clear SUSE intends to leave its mark in the brave new world of containerized applications.

— Mike Vizard

November 11, 2019
SUSE Manager 4 Makes IT Transformation More Cost Effective and Secure as it Simplifies Management from Edge to Core to Cloud
SUSE Manager for Retail 4 is also available, delivering open source infrastructure management tailored specifically for the retail industry

NUREMBERG, Germany – June 26, 2019 – As more enterprises make the transformation to a more agile infrastructure leveraging hybrid and multi-cloud, the need for simplified, centralized infrastructure management continues to grow. SUSE® today announced the availability of SUSE Manager 4 and SUSE Manager for Retail 4 open source infrastructure management solutions. They help enterprise DevOps and IT operations teams reduce complexity and regain control of IT assets no matter where they are, increase efficiency while meeting security policies, and optimize operations via automation to reduce costs.

“As SUSE helps enterprise customers transform to software-defined infrastructure so they can continue to innovate, compete and grow in today’s markets, we also provide the tools they need to efficiently manage and operate their mixed environments,” said Daniel Nelson, SUSE vice president of Products and Solutions. “SUSE Manager manages physical, virtual and containerized systems across edge, core and cloud environments, all from a single centralized console. It’s part of the IT transformation that lowers costs, reduces complexity and boosts business agility.”

As a key component of a software-defined infrastructure, SUSE Manager 4 allows customers to:
- Reduce costs and simplify management with enhanced content lifecycle management that makes it easier to move and manage packages throughout the DevOps cycle. Salt-based virtual machine management allows near real-time management of hundreds of servers.
- Increase availability and visibility with expanded monitoring and alerting capabilities built on the next-generation Prometheus-based monitoring stack. This enables customers to easily identify and resolve issues.
- Reduce complexity and regain control of complex heterogeneous IT environments with expanded operating system support and new SAP HANA deployment capabilities. They make it easier than ever to install and configure SAP HANA.
Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president for Cloud Management at IDC, said, “Enterprises value the access to innovation provided by open source technologies such as Linux. Organizations that rely on multiple Linux distributions often face numerous management challenges as the complexity and scale of their enterprise environments increase. Consistent, automated configuration compliance and control is particularly important for maintaining the levels of performance and security demanded by mission-critical applications that serve large numbers of end users.”

SUSE Manager for Retail 4

SUSE Manager for Retail delivers open source infrastructure management that is optimized and tailored specifically for the retail industry. From mainframe and HPC clusters, bare metal servers, VMs, and containers to point-of-service and point-of-sale terminals, kiosks, and self-service and reverse-vending systems, SUSE Manager for Retail helps reduce costs, optimize operations and ensure compliance across retail IT infrastructure.

SUSE Manager 4 is now available, and images are also available on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. For more information about SUSE Manager 4 and SUSE Manager for Retail 4, visit www.suse.com/susemanager and www.suse.com/retail.

About SUSE

SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 25 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed – today and tomorrow. For more information, visit www.suse.com.
June 26, 2019
SUSE Preps Independent DevOps Path

Once SUSE completes a separation from Micro Focus sometime next year, the goal for the again independent company will be to drive continued investments in a range of open source technologies that collectively advance DevOps.

Michael Miller, president of strategy, alliances and marketing for SUSE, said the acquisition by EQT, a private investment firm, is part of a three-to-five-year plan to invest in technologies that complement existing SUSE products and services. Core products and services are centered around a distribution of Linux, the OpenStack cloud management framework, the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment and Kubernetes container orchestration software, he said.

As part of that strategy, Miller said that may mean acquiring complementary open source or proprietary security and management technologies. Any proprietary technology that SUSE would acquire would be turned into an open source project later, he said.

Because it has been operating as an independent business unit, no one should expect to see any significant changes to the overall SUSE strategy beyond making additional investments in products and services or how the company will be going to market in 2019, he noted.

At the core of its strategy is a portfolio of open source PaaS and container-as-as-service (CaaS) environments that organizations of all sizes are employing to drive digital process transformation using custom applications that have now easier to deploy and maintain, Miller said.

Unlike many other investments involving private equity firms, EQT’s decision to acquire the company is being driven by a desire to invest for the long term rather than sell assets off in a piecemeal fashion, Miller noted. Micro Focus this week agreed to sell SUSE to EQT for $2.54 billion in part to help pay for the software assets it gained following a $8.8 billion merger with the software business unit of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE). The company has been part of Attachmate, which Micro Focus acquired in 2014. Earlier this year, Micro Focus CEO Chris Hsu was replaced by Stephen Murdoch, who was COO of Micro Focus.

Once the deal closes, SUSE will become an independent company for the first time since 2003, when it was acquired by Novell. Attachmate acquired Novell in 2010.

It remains to be seen whether SUSE will be spun out as public company or sold off to yet another vendor. For now, however, it may end up with more resources to combat its rivals, including Red Hat, than it would have had as a unit of Micro Focus.

In the meantime, the company—much like Red Hat—should continue to benefit from the massive amounts of research and development being poured into projects such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. At the same time, it continues to invest in Linux. The company recently released SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, SUSE Manager 3.2 and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 as part of an effort to drive a multimodal IT strategy around a common code base that includes MicroOS, which is optimized for containers and makes use of the same code base as SUSE Enterprise Linux.

While Red Hat may be the dominant provider of open source operating systems, SUSE has not given up. Meanwhile, the battle for control over open source PaaS and CaaS environments is still in its early stages. In fact, DevOps teams distributed across the enterprise most likely will determine the ultimate victor.

— Mike Vizard

July 6, 2018
SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8 to Accelerate Customer Software-Defined Infrastructure Deployments
SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8, based on OpenStack Pike, delivers improved interoperability, scalability and flexibility to better enable IT transformation and meet today’s business challenges

NUREMBERG, Germany, May 3, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — SUSE® today unveiled SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8, its latest enterprise-ready OpenStack Cloud platform. Based on OpenStack Pike, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8 is the first release to integrate the best of SUSE OpenStack Cloud and HPE OpenStack technology, which was acquired by SUSE last year. In addition to accelerating the deployment of software-defined infrastructure, it delivers better interoperability, scalability and flexibility to enable the IT transformation enterprise customers need to conquer today’s competitive market and business challenges.
SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8 joins a portfolio of solutions that are developed in collaboration with customers, partners and open source communities to deliver reliable innovation that helps simplify IT transformation and reduce cost.

“Throughout SUSE’s 25 years of open source experience and leadership, we’ve learned to continuously adapt to the requirements of customers, partners and the market,” said Gerald Pfeifer, vice president of Products and Technology Programs at SUSE. “We have applied that know-how to SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8 with new and updated features that will enhance its reputation as the open source cloud of choice for enterprise business. For customers, the speed, ease and flexibility of deployment make SUSE OpenStack Cloud stand out. The breadth of hardware certification and hypervisor support that SUSE OpenStack Cloud offers is unmatched in the market, giving customers more choice in how they deploy their software-defined infrastructure.”

Gary Chen, IDC research manager, Software Defined Compute, said, “Enterprise IT organizations are under significant deployment pressures as new, modern application and cloud models take hold and grow in adoption. With more organizations moving to a software-defined infrastructure such as OpenStack, streamlining operations through simplified maintenance and upgrades will be key to success by reducing complexity while coping with an expanding skills gap.”

To help customers overcome the skills gap and jump-start their SUSE OpenStack Cloud deployment, SUSE Select Services are now available. With the fixed-priced, flexible offering that combines consulting, maintenance services and knowledge transfer, customers are able to more quickly realize a return on their private cloud investment.

Enhancements to SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8 include:

Greater flexibility for customers with full support for OpenStack Ironic which provides the ability to quickly and easily provision bare metal servers for end users who want to deploy a workload image to a physical machine instead of a virtual machine instance on a hypervisor.

Expanded interoperability with new support for VMware NSX-V for software-defined networking.

Enhanced scalability to support large deployments.

Support for OpenStack Freezer to give distributed backup/restore DRaaS platform capabilities to customers who want to automate data backup and restore.

Two lifecycle tool options for deploying, maintaining and upgrading customers’ OpenStack environments, including the traditional Crowbar tool and the Cloud Lifecycle Management tool based on Ardana.

Extended three-year lifecycle support to accommodate enterprise customers’ longer maintenance and rollout timeframes.

A pre-integrated, fully scalable enterprise-grade monitoring solution that simplifies the monitoring and management of SUSE OpenStack Cloud environments and workloads.

Craig Parker, head of Integrated Systems Business at Fujitsu in EMEIA, said, “Customers looking to extend their on-premises environments by leveraging rapidly evolving, flexible and secure technologies from Fujitsu and SUSE will find that the new functionality in this latest release of SUSE OpenStack Cloud enables them to build the software-defined infrastructure they need to deliver on their business promises, while maintaining the business agility and flexibility that enterprises need.”

For additional information about SUSE OpenStack Cloud, visit www.suse.com/cloud.

About SUSE
SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 25 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed – today and tomorrow. For more information, visit www.suse.com.

Copyright 2018 SUSE LLC. All rights reserved. SUSE and the SUSE logo are registered trademarks of SUSE LLC in the United States and other countries. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
May 8, 2018
SUSE Ready Certification for SUSE CaaS Platform Now Available for Partners’ Containerized Applications

Enterprise customers can confidently deploy ISV containerized offerings that are tested and supported on SUSE’s container management solution

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, May 2, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — (KubeCon + CloudNativeCon) SUSE^® today introduced SUSE Ready certification for SUSE CaaS Platform, expanding its respected application-certification program for independent software vendors (ISVs). ISVs building containers that use the open source docker container format can now certify their containerized application on SUSE CaaS Platform, an enterprise-class container management solution that enables IT and DevOps professionals to more easily deploy, manage and scale container-based applications and services. SUSE Ready verifies for customers that partner solutions are tested and supported on SUSE software, so they can confidently use compatible and supported third-party solutions that best meet their business requirements, without being locked in to a single vendor.

“The SUSE Ready certification program has been well received by partners and customers,” said Frank Rego, director of the ISV Partner Program at SUSE. “The ISV community is pleased because it allows them to use their existing test methodology to ensure compatibility with SUSE products. Customers appreciate having confidence their solutions are supported by the application experts – the partners who create them. SUSE Ready certifications have grown sharply over the last year, and extending SUSE Ready to SUSE CaaS Platform will further expand the ecosystem and create value for more partners and customers.”

Containers speed application delivery, facilitate application portability, and enable a new class of high-performing cloud native applications. As container use grows, ISVs are increasingly offering a container deployment option for their applications, according to a recent survey of the SUSE ISV ecosystem. SUSE CaaS Platform uses open source Kubernetes to provide enterprises with production-grade container orchestration at scale, answering the ISV need for a platform to manage their containerized software at customer locations.

SUSE Ready is a certification program that allows ISVs to test their applications with SUSE products to ensure interoperability. ISVs perform the testing required for them to support their solution in a SUSE environment. SUSE Ready applications are listed in the SUSE Partner Software Catalog, the primary source for customers looking for supported solutions to run with SUSE software. This searchable database of partner solutions allows ISVs to showcase applications that have been tested and certified with SUSE Linux Enterprise, SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage. With the addition of SUSE CaaS Platform to the catalog, ISVs now have a central place to showcase all of their SUSE Ready applications and deployment options, whether physical, virtual, cloud or containerized.

A number of ISVs delivering applications that add value to container deployments are already SUSE Ready certified for SUSE CaaS Platform, including SAP, Micro Focus, Aqua Security, Avi Networks, Datadog, Dynatrace, JFrog, Minio, NeuVector, Pachyderm, Tymlez, Univa and XebiaLabs.

Rahul Tripathi, vice president of Product Management for Micro Focus, said, “As we continue with container delivery of our applications, SUSE Ready certification for SUSE CaaS Platform will be important to make sure customers can deploy Micro Focus containerized applications into a trusted environment. Having our containerized applications listed in a centralized location alongside our existing catalog entries will not only be great for exposing our customers to their various deployment options but also for leveraging our solutions to manage other SUSE Ready applications.”

Fei Huang, co-founder and CEO of NeuVector, said, “Customers want to be able to deploy Kubernetes applications with confidence, fully secured for production. SUSE Ready certification for SUSE CaaS Platform provides the confidence that the NeuVector multi-vector container firewall has been fully tested on SUSE CaaS Platform, giving them the ability to protect east-west container traffic, monitor containers for suspicious activity, and scan for vulnerabilities from a single security solution.”

ISVs can easily get started with SUSE Ready certification for SUSE CaaS Platform by joining the SUSE Partner Program, which also provides partner downloads, support, training and joint marketing opportunities for SUSE ISV partners. ISVs can work with SUSE to deploy their containerized applications in a SUSE CaaS Platform test environment for partners. For more information, visit www.suse.com/partners/isv/caas-platform.

About SUSE
SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 25 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed – today and tomorrow. For more information, visit www.suse.com.

Copyright 2018 SUSE LLC. All rights reserved. SUSE and the SUSE logo are registered trademarks of SUSE LLC in the United States and other countries. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

May 8, 2018