SUSECON 2025 Edge technology is finally past the tipping point thanks to inferencing and AI, according to SUSE CTO Brent Schroeder.
Schroeder, who spent more than a decade at Dell before joining SUSE, talked to The Register about the point at which an edge device can perform useful workloads rather than be a glorified sensor sending data back to a mothership.
"The teetering point," he says, "was Raspberry Pi, Arm, and small footprint operating systems. I think that was tipping point number one. Tipping point number two, that really brings it over the edge, is the ability to add inferencing and AI to it. Now I can make a lot of decisions. I could do rudimentary processing at the edge, but I couldn't really make decisions at the edge in real time. Now with inferencing at the edge, I can make decisions there in microseconds. That really just kind of opens the door wide."
SUSE has been advocating for edge devices and applications for a while now. You'll find its software in satellites and ground systems, as well as other edge devices. Schroeder describes it as "this perfect convergence, perfect storm of Kubernetes and cloud-native in containers, giving us very small footprint, very efficient applications with the ability to update them in an ephemeral manner, stateless."
The company is no stranger to container technology. In 2019, it memorably ditched OpenStack in favor of Kubernetes. OpenStack – or OpenInfra – recently voted to join the Linux Foundation, but Schroeder told us he reckoned the writing was already on the wall when SUSE pivoted, later acquiring Kubernetes management business Rancher.
While Schroeder was happy to talk about the company's Linux business and the impressively lengthy support options on offer from the company – he talked about a customer with over 200,000 ATMs deployed in South America, some of which were so remote that an update might take three days to perform, and laughed that communications in space were easy "compared to communication in the Amazon" — he was less keen to talk about the geopolitical controversies that have engulfed the technology world in recent months.
As a European company, SUSE is well placed to capitalize on a growing discomfort in the private and public sectors over dependency on US tech giants.
While he will not be drawn on the politics – SUSE, after all, is keen to keep US companies on-side – Schroeder says: "Think about it more from our philosophies aspect; I think the biggest aspect that is well positioned for us is the openness and flexibility.
"So from what we offer customers and how we deliver to customers, it really doesn't change anything because, you know, we've given them choice from the beginning."
SUSECON25, its annual Orlando techfest, which The Register attended, has finished, and Schroeder pondered his favorite announcement. The point release support for Multi Linux? The new AI services? SLES 16 and the upcoming service pack 7 for SLES 15?
For Schroeder, one of the more interesting moves the company is making is around Enterprise Container Management (ECM). "I love Linux," he says, "but I think some of the advances in cloud native, just in our ECM space, is the most exciting because of the breadth of impact that it has.
"I've been an advocate of getting into the SaaS delivery model for quite some time. So I'm really excited about what that has to offer and excited to see customers' reactions to that and how they take to that because certain people like to consume that way, and others want to consume the other. It gives them some more choice." ®