Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

December 2020

Using Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Service Mesh Based Applications for Distributed Deployments

Service Mesh is an emerging architecture pattern gaining traction today. Along with Kubernetes, Service Mesh can form a powerful platform which addresses the technical requirements that arise in a highly distributed environment typically found on a microservices cluster and/or service infrastructure. A Service Mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for facilitating service-to-service communications between microservices.

Set up K3s in High Availability using k3d

Have you ever wanted to try K3s high availability cluster “mode,” and you either did not have the minimum three “spare nodes” or the time required to set up the same amount of VMs? Then you are in for a good treat: meet k3d! If you’re not familiar with k3d, its name gives you a hint to what it’s all about: K3s in Docker.

November Meetup - GitOps with Rancher Continuous Delivery

As the number of clusters under management increase, application owners and cluster operators need a programatic way to manage deploying to their clusters. Rancher Continuous Delivery allows an administrator to create groups of clusters and link them to Git repositories. This means an application owner only ever needs access to the Git repository and not the management cluster. Deployment manifests can be defined in Helm, Kustomize or K8s yaml files and can be tailored based on attributes of the target clusters.

September 2020 Online Meetup - What's New with K3s?

If you haven't heard, Rancher's K3s was accepted last month as a Sandbox Project by the CNCF! Exciting things have been underway with K3s and in this September's meetup we will bring you up to speed on all of them. We’ll discuss the donation of K3s to the CNCF and talk about the changes you can expect to see as part of this move. Rancher experts will also cover the features and enhancements available in the 1.19 release. The focus of the 1.19 release has been improved configurability and operations for K3s clusters.

Rancher Online Meetup - December 2020: Open Source Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Learn about a new project we’ve been working on at Rancher Labs! Harvester is a virtualization and HCI platform that uses open-source hypervisors and other CNCF technologies to produce a seamless experience for administrators of complex environments that depend on Virtual Machines. Join Harvester’s principal engineer Sheng Yang and product manager William Jimenez as they walk you through the new tech.

Mitigating Kubernetes Security Vulnerability when using ExternalIP Services (CVE-2020-8554)

Earlier this month the Kubernetes project discovered a security issue affecting multitenant clusters: If a potential attacker can already create or edit services and pods, then they may be able to intercept traffic from other pods (or nodes) in the cluster. An attacker that is able to create a ClusterIP service and set the spec.externalIPs field can intercept traffic to that IP.

Kubernetes GitOps with Rancher Continuous Delivery

As the number of Kubernetes clusters under management increases, application owners and cluster operators need a programmatic way to approach cluster management. Rancher CD solves this by creating a git driven engine for applying cluster changes. Declarative code is stored in a git repo. As changes are committed to the repo, linked clusters are automatically updated. Gitops keeps all your clusters consistent, version controlled, and reduces the administrative burden as you scale.

Announcing Harvester: Open Source Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Software

Today, I am excited to announce project Harvester, open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software built using Kubernetes. Harvester provides fully integrated virtualization and storage capabilities on bare-metal servers. No Kubernetes knowledge is required to use Harvester. In the past few years, we’ve seen many attempts to bring VM management into container platforms, including our own RancherVM, and other solutions like KubeVirt and Virtlet.

Tapping Native Controls in Kubernetes to Protect Your Cloud-Native Apps

As companies adopt container technologies, they face a significant challenge - how do we secure this new attack surface? It’s an issue that you often see backlogged in favor of solving storage, networking and monitoring issues. Add on the challenge of educating the workforce on one of the fastest-growing open source projects to date, and it’s no wonder security has lagged as the primary focus for teams.

Kubernetes GitOps with Rancher Continuous Delivery

As the number of Kubernetes clusters under management increases, application owners and cluster operators need a programmatic way to approach cluster management. Rancher CD solves this by creating a git driven engine for applying cluster changes. Declarative code is stored in a git repo. As changes are committed to the repo, linked clusters are automatically updated. Gitops keeps all your clusters consistent, version controlled, and reduces the administrative burden as you scale.

Speed Up Development with Automated Kubernetes Deployments

Are you or your team currently looking for your next-generation architecture? Or perhaps are you already there, but looking for the best way to automate and manage it. In this blog, we’re going to talk about deploying Rancher environments using the power of env0. Rancher is a complete software stack for teams adopting containers.

Get Up and Running with NVIDIA GPUs in Rancher Kubernetes Clusters

With massive adoption of Kubernetes at enterprises worldwide, we are seeing Kubernetes going to new extremes. On the one hand, Kubernetes is being adopted for workloads at the edge and delivering value beyond the data center. On the other hand, Kubernetes is being used to drive Machine Learning (ML) and high-quality, high-speed data analysis capabilities.

Kubernetes Master Class - Service Mesh with Istio in Rancher 2.5

The release of Rancher 2.5 introduced some significant changes to the Istio Service Mesh integration. In addition to those changes, the Istio project has also undergone some significant redesign in recent versions. Staying current in this fast moving space can be a challenge. Fear not! In this Master Class, Rancher Field Engineer Jason Skrzypek will summarize the notable changes, discuss the rationale behind some of them, and demonstrate the possibilities that this new implementation unlocks.

What is Cloud-Native Storage?

Cloud-native is the ultimate buzzword lately. So, is “cloud-native storage” just an attempt to grab on to this concept, hoping for a little boost? Actually, there is something more to it, and I’ll unpack that here. The premise of cloud-native storage is simple: its native habitat is a Kubernetes cluster. When we design with the assumption that a technology will exist in Kubernetes, we get to look around and see what functionalities already exist in that system.

Kubernetes Master Class - Provision Kubernetes in vSphere with Rancher

vSphere continues to be a popular destination for Rancher-provisioned Kubernetes clusters. In this Master Class, Rancher Staff Software Engineer, Luther Monson and Field Engineer, David Holder present updates on the capabilities of Rancher with vSphere. Follow along with a full cluster lifecycle demonstration showcasing template creation, provisioning, cloud providers and more.

SUSE and Rancher - Enabling our Customers to Innovate Everywhere

In July, I announced SUSE's intent to acquire Rancher Labs, and now that the acquisition is final, today we embark on a new journey with SUSE. I couldn't be more excited about our future and what this means for our customers around the world. Just as Rancher made computing everywhere a possibility for our customers, with SUSE, we will empower our customers to innovate everywhere.

Deploying Amazon EKS Distro with RKE2

Today Amazon announced Amazon EKS Distro (EKS-D), a Kubernetes distribution based on and used by Amazon EKS. Amazon EKS Distro enables you to create reliable and secure Kubernetes clusters using the same versions of Kubernetes and its dependencies deployed by Amazon EKS. Each Amazon EKS Distro release follows the EKS process, verifying new Kubernetes versions for compatibility.