Container orchestration and cloud-native computing has gained lots of traction the recent years. The adoption has increased to such level that even enterprises in finance, banking and the public sector are interested. Compared to other businesses they differ by having extensive requirements on information security and IT security. One important aspect is how containers could be used in production environments while maintaining system separation between applications.

Secure access to your own private registry helps control who has access to your images. Compared to usage-based services such as Docker Hub and Quay, a Cycle hosted private registry only consumes the resources you give it access to, yielding a more cost-effective deployment. Let’s take a look at how simple it is to deploy a private Docker registry on Cycle.

In a recent post, we talked about Docker containers, and what you should know about them. Hopefully we cleared up any confusion you might have had about the Docker ecosystem. Perhaps with all that talk, it got you thinking about trying it out on one of your own applications? Well in this post we’d like to show you how easy it is to take your existing Ruby on Rails applications and run them inside a container.

Digital transformation across industries is driving the need for IT to enable cloud-native applications. This has led enterprises to adopt Kubernetes as the most effective way to support cloud-native, container-based architectures, and to modernize their applications and IT infrastructure. Organizations of all sizes are looking to take advantage of Kubernetes – for both greenfield applications and for re-architecting and modernizing legacy applications.

What is Istio? Istio is a service mesh technology adding an abstraction layer to the network. It intercepts all or part of the traffic in a k8s cluster and executes a set of operations on it. Which operations are supported? For example, setting up smart routing or implementing a circuit breaker approach, setting up “canary deployment”. Moreover, Istio makes possible imposing a limit on external interactions and controlling all routes between the cluster and an external network.

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.

These days Docker is everywhere! Since this popular, open-source container tool first launched in 2013 it has gone on to revolutionize how we think about deploying our applications. But if you missed the boat with containerization and are left feeling confused about what exactly Docker is and how it can benefit you, then we’ve put together this post to help clear up any confusion you might have.

One of the chief complexities in running large scale containerized applications is the need for continuous systems/application monitoring. Containers are very different from traditional VMs and the 3 tier applications that run on them. Monitoring that needs to ensure that SLAs promised to the business are being met as well as an ability to forecast usage trends while identifying problem areas such as bugs, capacity challenges, slowing performance, and any potential downtime.

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.

AKS is the managed service from Azure for Kubernetes. When you create an AKS cluster, Azure creates and operates the Kubernetes control plane for you at no cost. The only thing you do as a user is to say how many worker nodes you’d like, plus other configurations we’ll see in this post. So, with that in mind, how can you improve the AKS cluster performance of a service in which Azure pretty much manages almost everything?