Containers, along with containerization technology like Docker and Kubernetes, have become increasingly common components in many developers’ toolkits. The goal of containerization, at its core, is to offer a better way to create, package, and deploy software across different environments in a predictable and easy-to-manage way.

The mechanism for interacting with Kubernetes on a daily basis is typically through a command line tool called kubectl. kubectl is primarily used to communicate with Kubernetes API servers to create, update, delete workloads within Kubernetes. The objective of this tutorial is to provide an overview of some of the common commands that you can utilise, as well as provide a good starting point in managing Kubernetes.

Today I’m excited to announce a new Rancher Labs project called Rio. Rio is a MicroPaaS that can be layered on any standard Kubernetes cluster. Consisting of a few Kubernetes custom resources and a CLI to enhance the user experience, users can easily deploy services to Kubernetes and automatically get continuous delivery, DNS, HTTPS, routing, monitoring, autoscaling, canary deployments, git-triggered builds, and much more.

Infrastructure as code is an important methodology for ensuring that your distributed systems are treated as cattle and not pets. Your Kubernetes and Rancher clusters are no different. You should be able to provision your Rancher clusters, your Kubernetes clusters, and all of your apps with automation.

Today we are announcing the support for Windows containers with Kubernetes 1.14 in Preview mode. As many users may know, Rancher 2.1.0 supported Windows containers in experimental mode. Now that SIG Windows and Microsoft have announced the general availability of containers in Windows Server 2019 with Kubernetes 1.14, we have upgraded Rancher to both support the latest version of Windows containers (and Kubernetes) and after the preview is over, make it generally available.