Earlier this year, Rancher Labs introduced k3s, a new open source project which is a lightweight implementation of Kubernetes that is easy to install and can run on x86 and ARM infrastructure with only 512 MB of RAM required to run it. It is geared towards teams that need to deploy applications quickly and reliably to resource-constrained environments. Some use cases for k3s are edge, Single Board Computers, IoT, and CI.

A Kubernetes cluster is a collection of resources running across multiple nodes. Managing these resources also entails granting and controlling users' access to them. Different teams could be running their applications on the same cluster. Configuring RBAC is essential when it comes to such multi-tenant setups. Grouping resources into namespaces and giving certain teams access to them is a good start. Rancher leverages this to more effectively group the cluster's resources into larger subsets called projects.

In our August Online Meetup, we look at the new Cluster Template feature coming in Rancher 2.3!

As Kubernetes matures, enterprises are increasingly using it to run mission-critical applications with strict business requirements for uptime and availability. As a result, it is important to consider how your Kubernetes applications can recover from the failure of a server, data center and even entire region.

In this Kubernetes Master Class, Rancher Partner Packet Labs shows you the benefits of using k3s for edge applications.

We recently launched Rio, a new open-source project. It is a MicroPaaS built on top of Kubernetes, Istio, Knative, and Prometheus. You can use it to build, test, deploy, scale, and version stateless apps on any standard Kubernetes cluster, which means that you can run your apps the way you want to without having to spend time wiring them together. Join this session to see a live demo of the product features and capabilities.

In this presentation by Rancher Director of Community Jason van Brackel, you will learn how to setup alerts with Rancher and Prometheus Alert Manager to find problems before there's an outage. You'll also learn to visualize metrics for Kubernetes and for your applications so you can gather new insights to your users' usage patterns and your applications' run-time behaviors.

Ready to learn about using Kubernetes clusters and workloads? Watch the latest edition of Rancher's free, weekly intro training to Kubernetes and Rancher.

Database workloads that require fast recovery can't afford manual intervention. StorageOS engineers will highlight challenges running databases in StatefulSets and demonstrate how to solve them on Rancher.

The latest Kubernetes version provides many security-related enhancements and controls, but it is far from being secure by default. Kubernetes is a complex orchestration platform with many different implementations, across multi-cloud/hybrid environments. Configuring it to comply with security best practices and specific security requires time and expertise that most organizations don’t possess.