When Frodo was commissioned on a seemingly straightforward journey to retrieve the One Ring, I doubt he realized the adventure and commitment he was embarking on. Rancher Labs started on a similarly daring journey almost four years ago. It didn’t take a wizard showing up uninvited at dinner to convince us of this. From the beginning of Rancher Labs, our founding team had a deep conviction about the importance of storage in the future of cloud-first computing.

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Longhorn, an enterprise-grade, cloud-native container storage solution. Longhorn directly answers the need for an enterprise-grade, vendor-neutral persistent storage solution that supports the easy development of stateful applications within Kubernetes. We’ve been working on Longhorn for almost as long as we’ve been around as a company.

When it comes to deciding where and how to shop for food, consumers have a choice. And it may only take one negative experience with a retailer for a consumer to take their business elsewhere. For food retail leader Albert Heijn, customer satisfaction and innovation at its 950+ retail stores and e-commerce site are driving forces.

Rancher 2.4, the latest release of Rancher’s Kubernetes management platform, includes a new CIS security scanning feature. The Center for Internet Security publishes more than 100 benchmarks for Kubernetes, which are considered the default standard benchmark for defining security of Kubernetes clusters. With Rancher 2.4, CIS scanning is an integrated part of the Rancher UI itself for RKE clusters. If you create or import any RKE cluster via Rancher, CIS Scan will work flawlessly.

The promise of Kubernetes is to empower your organization to quickly deliver applications and services to your customers. Delivering fast cycle time and innovation requires developers and operators to collaborate effectively to ensure safety while moving fast. The GitOps methodology has taken hold in the Kubernetes ecosystem to deliver on this promise. What is GitOps? GitOps provides a mechanism to safely deploy Kubernetes manifests stored in a Git repository.

Today we launched the Rancher Academy, our new free training portal. The first course is Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1, and in it you’ll learn exactly how to deploy Rancher and use it to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters. This professional certification program is designed to help Kubernetes practitioners demonstrate their knowledge and competence with Kubernetes and Rancher – and to advance in their careers.

For teams that deal with machine learning (ML), there comes a point in time where training a model on a single machine becomes untenable. This is often followed by the sudden realization that there is more to machine learning than simply model training. There are a myriad of activities that have to happen before, during and after model training. This is especially true for teams that want to productionize their ML models.

This article will describe the process of installing Rancher 2.4 on a highly available K3s Kubernetes cluster in Microsoft Azure. It will also take advantage of Microsoft Azure Database for MySQL, which removes the dependency on etcd and provides us all the additional features that Azure delivers with this service. You will learn how to deploy the infrastructure to support this pattern using only the Azure Cloud Shell.

Kubernetes is hugely popular and growing, and is primarily used on the cloud — 83 percent of organizations included in a large CNCF survey said they run Kubernetes on at least one public cloud. Amazon is a natural option for Kubernetes clusters, due to its mature and robust infrastructure, and a variety of deployment options with a varying degree of automation.

In today’s enterprises, we spend much of our time dealing with information, whether it’s data, knowledge or analytics. Just like the assembly line workers of last century, today’s knowledge workers deal with similar logistics of taking raw materials as an input and producing a finished product as an output. Only in this case, the raw material is all the unorganized and sometimes random information at our disposal, and the finished product is structured information.