This is the recording for the August 2021 Online Meetup from SUSE on Rancher Desktop. Rancher Desktop puts Kubernetes and container management at your fingertips as part of a Mac and Windows desktop application. It makes the experience of working with k8s and containers manageable for developers. It lets you select your version of Kubernetes, test your workloads when Kubernetes is upgraded, try containers before pushing to a registry, and more.

Everything breaks at some point; whether it is infrastructure (DNS, network, storage, etc.) or Kubernetes itself, something will fail eventually. In this session, we will walk through some common failure scenarios, including identifying failures and how to respond to them in the fastest way possible using the same troubleshooting steps, scripts, and tools Rancher Support uses when supporting our Enterprise customers.

Take a deep dive with Staff Engineer Luther Monson into the new node pool scale down feature recently released in Rancher v2.5.6. This masterclass will walk you through everything you will need to know to go from zero to a scaling Kubernetes cluster using Rancher. We will explore using the cluster autoscaler in tandem with this new feature to scale pools on demand. Watch a full demo of a cluster sizing up and down to load while using a custom cloud provider built for the Rancher API.

Learn how Harvester, SUSE's new HCI platform, can be deployed across bare metal notes with the Tinkerbell provisioning engine.

Office Hour, Week 1: Accelerate Dev Workflows with special guest Thorsten Klein, k3d maintainer!

Introducing Hypper, a new package manager for Kubernetes designed with cluster administrators in mind. Hypper is built on Helm and charts but makes some different assumptions around multi-tenancy and dependent charts (which can be useful with CRD handling). Where Helm assumes a user could be one of many users running in multi-tenant, Hypper assumes the user is a cluster administrator managing a cluster.

Rancher 2.5 introduces a new, improved monitoring integration. It is still based on Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager, but much more flexible regarding configuration options and customizations. It also directly ships with much improved dashboards and alerting rules. Unfortunately, due to the necessary internal changes, there is no automatic upgrade path available from the old to the new monitoring. While you can continue to use the old monitoring with 2.5, there are some manual migration steps necessary to get all the benefits from the new monitoring system and keep all the configurations and customizations from the old one.

Rancher and Kong are excited to present a Master Class that will explore API management combined with universal service meshes and how they support hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

Introducing Rancher KIM, the Kubernetes Image Manager. KIM is a proper Kubernetes client that installs and manages the back-end services required to support its focus on delivering a `docker build` (and related image management) compatible experience to your development workflow. This means you can download the KIM executable for your client platform and run `kim build --tag your/image:tag .`, just as you would invoke `docker build`, and have the image immediately available on your single-node K3s cluster. There's no need to push the image to an external repository nor export it to a tarball and then import it into K3s containerd.