Introduction
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, SUSE's SVP and General Manager for Cloud-Native, Pete Smails, outlined how the company is evolving from its open-source operating system roots into an AI-native infrastructure platform. The goal: to unify artificial intelligence services, container management, and virtual machines (VMs) on a single, enterprise-ready open foundation.
The Evolution of SUSE's Mission
Smails explained that SUSE’s mission today is to serve as an open infrastructure platform for modern workloads. “The bottom of our stack is still the operating system, but above that, we have a world-class build system that is completely secure and robust,” he said. He described this foundation as “boring plumbing” but noted its critical importance in today’s continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.
The Orchestration Layer
To align with open infrastructure principles, SUSE developed its own orchestration layer. This is where SUSE Rancher Prime comes into play—a container management and Kubernetes orchestration platform that enables organizations to build and deploy cloud-native applications across any environment.
A Technology Triumvirate: AI, Containers, and VMs
Smails positions today’s SUSE as a company unifying three critical technologies: AI, containers, and virtual machines. The rationale, he noted, is the rapid evolution toward multi-data-center and multi-cloud deployments. “We need to embrace not assimilation but unification of VMs and container management,” Smails said. This fusion allows software teams to capitalize on AI potential while redefining operational simplicity.
SUSE Rancher Prime Updates
Recent enhancements to SUSE Rancher Prime include an open ecosystem for AI agents, giving enterprises new automated operational tools. Meanwhile, SUSE Virtualization provides a stable foundation for modernizing legacy infrastructure and further unifies VM and container management.
Introducing Liz: The AI Agent for Operations
At the conference, SUSE debuted a giant fluffy green lizard mascot named Liz—but the real star is the context-aware AI agent also called Liz, integrated into the SUSE Rancher Prime environment. “Imagine Liz as one of your software engineering team crew,” Smails said. “Liz goes out searching across your deployment environment and might come back and say—‘Oh, you’ve got a couple CVEs, would you like me to go see if there are clean versions of these applications?’” Software engineers can then interact with Liz to remediate issues, streamlining operations.
Conclusion
SUSE is repositioning itself as the infrastructure layer for the AI era by bringing together open-source principles, robust orchestration, and intelligent automation. With tools like Rancher Prime, SUSE Virtualization, and the Liz AI agent, the company aims to help enterprises modernize their infrastructure while embracing the full potential of cloud-native and AI workloads.