SUSE at KubeCon EU 2025: The recap

This year’s CloudNativeCon KubeCon Europe 2025 took place in London, England.

SUSE was a platinum sponsor for this flagship event, which had a record-breaking attendance of nearly thirteen thousand (13’000) attendees.

Here’s an overview of SUSE’s presence through the different days and hear from different leaders key takeaways.

Day 0: Rancher Day at BAFTA

Rancher Day entrance

Like indexing in programming, KubeCon starts on Day 0. This first day is reserved for the co-located events held by CNCF projects maintainers and major partners, such as SUSE.

This year’s Rancher Day was held in the world-famous BAFTA building, with 100 attendees*. The format was a workshop where the attendees used the modernized Rancher Rodeo on Instruqt.

TIP: If you missed Rancher Day and want to know more about our Rodeos, do not worry as they’re occurring all the time. For more information, see https://www.rancher.com/events?event_type=rodeos

The workshop provided an opportunity to see what the SUSE Rancher Prime platform has to offer, with an award-winning story about saving the ISS astronauts. Yes, cloud native just became space native.

Rancher Day Party

After a very successful workshop, the attendees became even more VIPs by attending the SUSE Party at BAFTA. Simply the best way to start KubeCon week.

Day 0: SUSE at Kubernetes on Edge day

Edge day sponsor thank you

Kubernetes on Edge is growing quickly. SUSE was there on Day 0 for the Edge Day co-located event. SUSE was one of the two Diamond sponsors and had a booth in front of the speaking room.

While a half-day co-located event, it was still packed with technical talks focusing on current challenges such as massive scaling, networking improvements, packaging and resiliency. Fun fact, not a single talk title had the most famous letters AI in them.

SUSE booth: come for swag, stay for relatable demos

KubeCon SUSE booth

It’s not a secret that SUSE booth is one of the most sought-after by attendees for its plushies. And this year we delivered 1,000 Geekos, which were gone in just two days.

Even if the swag usually attracts the attendees ‌first, this also gives them a great chance to see the booth in more detail, and ask the experts questions about our products.

This year, the following five kiosks were staffed with some of our best experts:

SUSE Rancher Prime

SUSE Rancher Prime kiosk

SUSE Observability

SUSE Observability kiosk

SUSE Virtualization

SUSE Virtualization kiosk

SUSE AI

SUSE AI kiosk

SUSE Edge

SUSE Edge kiosk

Not only buzz words

Based on the different keynotes, SUSE could not be more on-trend. Multicluster management, observability for infrastructure and assets awareness, data sovereignty with local infrastructure, controlled and manageable AI, increase in edge deployments. Each of these words relates to current challenges, for which SUSE has solutions for it.

As Andreas Prins put it, did you fill out your bingo card?

If one of these topics is relatable, don’t hesitate to contact us for a closer discussion and assessment of your current challenges.

4 key trends

“… What is maybe new or becoming more predominant is when we’re saying computers are everywhere, we [actually] say cloud native is everywhere”
David Stauffer,  Senior Director Product Management, SUSE

SUSE was on point with the choice of the kiosks compared to overall KubeCon trends. However, it was not based on “pure luck”. To better understand what these trends are and how SUSE addresses them, here’s what our Senior Director Product Management, David Stauffer had to say:

Key takeaways

“…In terms of topics that we’ve heard on the floor from customers and partners, I want to highlight two things: sovereignty and AI.
…Why does it matter? There’s an increasing demand for customers to be in control of their own infrastructure, of their own [workloads], of their data.”
Oliver Ries, VP of Product Management, SUSE

Following the key trends, we asked our VP of Product Management what he learned and how SUSE can help our customers and community solve today’s problems with our solutions. Here’s Oliver’s response:

Partner ecosystem: SUSE & Portworx for modern virtualization

“…[Customers wonder] how do we move our virtual machine workloads without changing our virtual machines and [moving them] to Kubernetes.
And how to [move the virtual machines] safely, without losing too many functionalities that we’re using from [legacy virtualization]  today.”
Yvo van Doorn, Director Cloud Native Architects (EMEA/LATAM), Portworx @ Pure Storage

“…If you move your virtual machines more in the cloud native thinking, you start to benefit from a lot of the practices like automation, short sprints and quick delivery.
Even before you have re-architected your entire monolith into microservices”
Andreas Prins, VP of Product Marketing, SUSE

Our VP of Product Marketing, Andreas Prins, caught up with one of our partners, Portworx, to discuss ‌KubeCon and quickly share on one of the hottest topics nowadays: virtualization.

See what the great insights they shared in this video:

SUSE championing community and open source

Rejekts.io keynote by SUSE

One of the main reasons KubeCon is a successful event is its community oriented mindset. And SUSE is seen in very high regard for championing open source and being a community leader.

This year, once again, SUSE proved to care about the community by sponsoring Rejekts.io, and had the privilege to speak at the closing event keynote. Orlin Vasilev, our principal technology and community advocate, gave a speech that showed our values and how much we care about the community and open source. The result: a standing ovation. Yes, it was that impactful.

Looking ahead

KubeCon Europe 2025 was definitively packed with news, announcements and human interactions.

Still, we’re already looking ahead with several releases of our key products and also new ones that will help you sail more confidently into your cloud native journey.

Stay tuned for the announcement in the coming weeks, and do not hesitate to contact us. Our team of experts is here to help.