Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2019

What Do People Love About Rancher?

More than 20,000 environments have chosen Rancher as the solution to make the Kubernetes adventure painless in as many ways as possible. More than 200 businesses across finance, health care, military, government, retail, manufacturing, and entertainment verticals have recognized that Rancher simply works better than other solutions.

Three Ways to Secure Kubernetes From Inside Threats

Inherently, Kubernetes clusters are multi-user. As a result, organizations want to ensure that cross-communication is protected via role-based access control, logical isolation and network policies. A container orchestration system such as Kubernetes brings information technology operations and developers (DevOps) closer together, making it easier for teams to collaborate effectively and efficiently with each other.

Introducing k3s: The Lightweight Kubernetes Distribution Built for the Edge

Today Rancher Labs is announcing a new open source project, k3s, which is a lightweight, easy to install Kubernetes distribution geared towards resource-constrained environments and low touch operations. Some use cases in which k3s really shines are edge, ARM, IoT, and CI. The work for k3s started as a component of Rio, an experimental project we started last year.

Deploying Redis Cluster on top of Kubernetes

Redis (which stands for REmote DIctionary Server) is an open source, in-memory datastore, often used as a database, cache or message broker. It can store and manipulate high-level data types like lists, maps, sets, and sorted sets. Because Redis accepts keys in a wide range of formats, operations can be executed on the server, which reduces the client’s workload. It holds its database entirely in memory, only using the disk for persistence.

How Enterprise Kubernetes Benefits from Multi-Cluster Apps

There is a lot to love about Kubernetes. It offers one of the best ways to deploy and run applications on a large pool of resources. With its easy-to-use UI and out-of-the-box capabilities like RBAC, monitoring, auditing, logging, and more, Rancher makes it easy to stand up and manage enterprise grade Kubernetes. Using Rancher, IT Operators can point to their cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.) or datacenter and create a cluster with just a few clicks.

February 2019 Online Meetup: Multi Cluster Applications, Global DNS, and Multi Tenant Catalogs

Rancher 2.2 focuses on day two operations for Kubernetes, the ongoing management tasks that secure clusters, reduce downtime, and keep applications secure. For edge deployments and businesses that run multi-tenant clusters or multiple installations of the same application, Rancher 2.2 Preview 2 introduces features that lighten the workload of operations team, helping to eliminate redundant work and human error. It includes tools for increasing the availability of multi-cluster applications and new options for configuring application catalogs at the cluster and project levels.

Kubernetes in the Region: Observations and an Offer

Since joining Rancher Labs to head up the Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore region, my day revolves around discussing containers/Kubernetes use cases and adoption with many of the top enterprises, DevOps groups, and executives in the area. Not only is this a great learning experience and a fantastic way to meet people, it is also a huge eye opener into the many reasons why Kubernetes adoption is growing so rapidly and what the current challenges are.

Kubernetes Master Class: Getting Your Hands 'Dirty' in Container Sandbox

This session of the Kubernetes Master Class Series addresses the proliferation of "sandboxing" techniques to isolate containers and improve their security posture. We'll provide a short background on the rise of "sandboxing" technology in the global security space and will drill down into different container "sandboxing" technologies and projects.

Kubernetes vs Docker Swarm: Comparison of Two Container Orchestration Tools

With the rise of the containerization technology and increased attention from enterprises and technologists in general, more and more containerized applications have been deployed to the cloud. Moreover, research conducted by 451 Research predicts that the application container market will grow dramatically through 2020, which will continue to expand the number of containerized applications being deployed to the cloud.

Runc CVE-2019-5736

Today CVE-2019-5736 was announced which impacts all known versions of runc. Runc is the underlying component that creates containers in Docker, Kubernetes, and many other container systems. The full details of this vulnerability are available in the Openwall oss-security mailing. Due to the severity of this issue, exploits will not be published for another week, giving people time to patch.

Kubernetes Master Class: Building an Enterprise Kubernetes Strategy

Kubernetes sits at the intersection of DevOps and ITOps and many organizations are trying to figure out key questions, like who should own kubernetes, how many clusters to deploy, how to deliver it as a service, how to build a security policy, and how much standardization is critical for adoption. In this session Rancher founder Shannon Williams will share best practices pulled from working with hundreds of teams to implement a Kubernetes strategy.

Introducing Multi-Cluster Applications in Rancher 2.2 Preview 2

I’m excited to announce the release of Rancher 2.2 Preview 2, which contains a number of powerful features for day two operations on Kubernetes clusters. Please visit our release page or the release notes to learn more about all of the features we shipped today. In this article I introduce one of the features: multi-cluster applications. Read on to learn how this will dramatically reduce your workload and increase the reliability of multi-cluster operations.

Rancher vs. RKE: What Is the Difference?

When you are using Rancher to manage your Kubernetes clusters, at some point you will encounter the terms Rancher, RKE, and custom cluster. If you are new to Rancher, it can be difficult to understand the difference between and purpose of each of these concepts. In this post, I will go over what each component is used for and how they are used together in parts of the system.