For this edition of The New Stack Makers, we sat down with Pete Smails, SVP and general manager for cloud-native at SUSE. Keen to take us through the current state of SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Rancher Prime, and the organization’s work with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Smails joined us during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam.Although many of us will know SUSE as an open source operating system company in the first instance, the company today is working to cement its position as an AI-native infrastructure platform, unifying AI services, containers, and virtual machines (VMs) on a single open, enterprise-ready foundation.“Ultimately, SUSE’s mission today is to be 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. I know that sounds like boring plumbing, but it’s actually surprisingly relevant in today’s world of continuous integration and continuous delivery,” said Smails.Smails explained that his company’s alignment with open infrastructure principles drove it to develop its orchestration layer. This is where the SUSE Rancher Prime container management and Kubernetes orchestration layer comes in, as it enables building and deploying cloud-native applications everywhere.A technology triumvirate As an operating platform for modern workloads, Smails positions the SUSE of today as a company that works to unify AI, containers, and VMs, so how does this break down?The rationale here, according to Smails, is that the world is rapidly evolving toward using multiple data centers across multiple clouds. This requires us to embrace not assimilation but unification of VMs and container management. This fusion has been undertaken to allow software teams to capitalize on the potential of AI and redefine their own operational simplicity.Smails pointed to recent news related to SUSE Rancher Prime. The technology now includes an open ecosystem for AI agents, designed to provide enterprises with new automated operational tools. Additionally, SUSE Virtualization sits as a stable foundation for modernizing legacy infrastructure and further unifies VM and container management. Liz, it’s a Lizard, not an ElizabethPutting on a show at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe this year was a giant fluffy green lizard known as Liz. Aside from being human in a branded lizard suit ready for selfies, SUSE Liz is a context-aware AI agent integrated into the SUSE Rancher Prime environment. “Imagine Liz as one of your software engineering team crew. 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 interact with Liz in natural language and get the work that they done,” enthused Smails. Unlike general-purpose AI, Liz is designed to understand the live state of clusters, namespaces and workloads. Available as an extension, Liz resides within the platform engineering team’s workspace to provide real-time guidance where and when needed. Whether engineers are investigating a failing deployment or trying to understand a new Kubernetes concept, Liz uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to bridge the gap between operational data and actionable insights.You’ve got to give developers the tools they need so that they can rapidly adopt cloud-native technologies and take advantage of all the great infrastructure… making it as easy as possible in a secure way.As well as drilling deeper into SUSE Virtualization and calling the technology a “modern VMware alternative” today, Smails also covered his firm’s Rancher Developer Access offering. This service is designed to run Kubernetes alongside trusted content directly into a developer’s local environment, with what the company calls minimal cognitive overhead. Developers first, cloud-native always“You’ve got to give developers the tools they need so that they can rapidly adopt cloud-native technologies, build new applications, and take advantage of all the great infrastructure that SUSE and the wider community are building. That’s where Rancher Developer Access comes in. We are committed to upping our game from a developer standpoint to drive more adoption, to get people using the technology of the AI age and making it as easy as possible in a secure way,” said Smails.Coming full circle, it is perhaps logical to still think of SUSE as a company that starts with an open-source operating system (SUSE Linux Enterprise is still available), but now as an organization with an expanded set of cloud-native infrastructure services designed to serve both developers and operations teams. All of that comes with the safety nets and automation necessary to run containerized workloads at enterprise scale. Plus, anyway, who doesn’t like a fluffy chameleon toy?The post How SUSE positions itself as the infrastructure layer for the AI era appeared first on The New Stack.