First, a big hearty congratulations from all of us at Elastisys to the entire Rancher Labs team for their successful acquisition by SuSE. Like Rancher we at Elastisys are fully committed to open source and believe open source and Kubernetes offer the world the best path to democratization of the cloud. We also know that the best tools to meet the scaling needs of modern applications is a multicloud deployment of microservices on Kubernetes. All of these goals are strengthened through this merger of two of the world’s leading open source advocates and we believe it will make our technology world a healthier place.
At Elastisys, we take these same values and commitment to open source and Kubernetes and add our expertise in regulatory compliances, such as GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA and ISO-27001 to help our customers meet these ever-increasing needs. Our strategy is to ship an open source distribution that can be freely utilized by anyone in the community and we build our commercial model on delivering managed services to simplify our customers compliance demands, education and development services to implement compliant offerings and support for users who wish to utilize the open source technology we have built.
What the this means for Europe and for the US
From the perspective of ones who work alot with the compliance aspect of cloud native transformations, the dynamics the SuSE and Rancher merger creates is highly interesting. Europe and the Nordics in particular have long been at the forefront of looking after the individual’s right to data protection. This is a trend that thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar regulations now are gaining worldwide attention.
Even though the economy is global and the cloud native community more than most, country borders and legal origins still matter both from a legal perspective but also more importantly they come with a cultural background and different emphasis on different kinds of questions.
That Europe now adds a highly successful Kubernetes vendor to the European portfolio of cloud native companies should only speed the adoption of cloud native technologies in Europe. It will also hopefully speed up the awareness in the US of all the good things that come from the thinking the European Union and European companies has done around data protection concerns, something which the enforcement of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is currently bringing into full public attention this summer.
Our belief is that a set of ground rules similar to the GDPR should be implemented as a global standard for data protection for the benefit of all individuals. The trend is clear that something like this will need to come into force in the future and this move and similar only quickens the process.
Just like the new SuSE/Rancher, Elastisys will always be fully committed to open source and freedom from vendor and cloud provider lock-in and earn our financial rewards from delivering added value and services that customers will value and choose freely.
