In this post, we will outline a reference architecture for setting up K3s in a High Availability (HA) configuration. This means that your K3s cluster can tolerate a failure and remain up and running and serving traffic to your users. Your applications should also be built and configured for high availability, but that is beyond the scope of this tutorial. K3s is a lightweight certified Kubernetes distribution developed at Rancher Labs that built is for IoT and edge computing.

As Kubernetes continues to establish itself as the industry standard for container orchestration, finding effective ways to use a declarative model for your applications and tools is critical to success. In this blog, we’ll set up a K3s Kubernetes cluster in AWS, then implement secure GitOps using ArgoCD and Vault. Check out the source for the infrastructure and the Kubernetes umbrella application here.

Rancher Labs has launched its much-anticipated Rancher version 2.5 into the cloud-native space, and we at LSD couldn't be more excited. Before highlighting some of the new features, here is some context as to how we think Rancher is innovating. Kubernetes has become one of the most important technologies adopted by companies in their quest to modernize.

As a Senior Solutions Engineer helping customers deploy cloud-native technologies, I have been using Docker and Rancher for more than five years. Heck, I even helped steer Rancher for offline use when it was the 0.19 release. I have loved the product and company for YEARS. We all know how complicated it is to set up Kubernetes, and customers love Rancher because it simplifies that rollout.

As part of Rancher 2.5, we are excited to introduce a new, simpler way to install Rancher called RancherD. RancherD is a single binary you can launch on a host to bring up a Kubernetes cluster bundled with a deployment of Rancher itself. This means you just have one thing to manage: RancherD. Configuration and upgrading are no longer two-step processes where you first have to deal with the underlying Kubernetes cluster and then deal with the Rancher deployment.

Amazon EKS is the most popular managed Kubernetes solution. DevOps teams can quickly spin up clusters in the cloud and get started with Kubernetes in a few clicks. As organizations embrace Kubernetes in the cloud, the challenge becomes managing clusters across multiple regions or accounts. At that point, organizations struggle to visualize all of their clusters.

Despite the lockdown restrictions of the last six months, I'm delighted to announce that we've released Rancher 2.5 on schedule today. This latest release represents another major milestone of Rancher's "Computing Everywhere" strategy by delivering management capabilities that match the extraordinary popularity of Amazon EKS and our lightweight Kubernetes distribution, K3s.

The ability of Kubernetes to easily deploy and manage containerized software has given organizations tremendous capabilities in their cloud services, with clusters multiplying into the hundreds or thousands and extending out to the edge for any number of purposes. But its growing popularity has also led to challenges in managing complexity in an environment that is conducive to cluster sprawl.

Adopting Kubernetes and service-based architecture can bring many benefits to organizations – teams move faster and applications scale more easily. However, visibility into cloud costs is made more complicated with this transition. This is because applications and their resource needs are often dynamic, and teams share core resources without transparent prices attached to workloads.

“With Rancher and Kubernetes, we’ve started moving to a microservices architecture. What this means is our teams don’t have to know Kubernetes inside out, just the projects they’re working on. Rancher simplifies Kubernetes for technicians, which results in greater agility and innovation.” Tertius Wessels, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Entersekt We’ve all heard about high-profile security hacks and have no doubt been the recipient of phishing emails.