The enterprise Kubernetes management space has definitely become a lot more crowded over the past two years as traditional vendors and startups alike attempt to grab a slice of this massive market. The increasingly competitive vendor landscape makes Forrester’s recent recognition of Rancher Labs that much more meaningful.
A headline in a recent Register article jumped off my screen with the claim: “No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too.” Well, that certainly got my attention…for a couple of reasons. First, the emphasis on an absolute claim was quite literally shouting at me. In my experience, absolutes are rare occurrences in software engineering. Second, it was nearly impossible to imagine what evidence this conclusion was based on.
Many businesses use cloud services on AWS and also run workloads on Kubernetes and Knative. Today, it’s difficult to integrate events from AWS to workloads on a Rancher cluster, preventing you from taking full advantage of your data and applications. To trigger a workload on Rancher when events happen in your AWS service, you need an event source that can consume AWS events and send them to your Rancher workload.
In Switzerland, Inventx is the IT partner of choice for financial and insurance service providers. Its full-stack DevOps platform, ix.AgileFactory, allows financial organizations to move to a modern, cloud-native and microservices-centric infrastructure. The platform decouples core applications from the central infrastructure, allowing organizations to better manage and innovate applications in safety.
Kubernetes provides the freedom to rapidly build and ship applications while dramatically minimizing deployment and service update cycles. However, the velocity of application deployment requires a new approach that involves integrating tools as early as possible in the deployment pipeline and inspecting the code and configuration against Kubernetes security best practices. Kubernetes has many security knobs that address various aspects required to harden the cluster and applications running inside.
As a network of microservices changes and grows, the interactions between them can be difficult to manage and understand. That’s why it’s handy to have a service mesh as a separate infrastructure layer. A service mesh is an approach to solving microservices at scale. It handles routing and terminating traffic, monitoring and tracing, service delivery and routing, load balancing, circuit breaking and mutual authentication.
Kubernetes upgrades are always a tough undertaking when your clusters are running smoothly. Upgrades are necessary as every three months, Kubernetes releases a new version. If you do not upgrade your Kubernetes clusters, within a year, you can fall far behind. Rancher has always focused on solving problems, and they are at it again with a new open source project called System Upgrade Controller. In this tutorial, we will see how to upgrade a K3s Kubernetes cluster using System Upgrade Controller.
Sometimes technology partnerships are greater than the sum of their parts. That’s the case with two Swiss companies who have come together to deliver Kubernetes solutions to their customers. VSHN is Switzerland’s leading 24/7 cloud operations partner and first Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. amazee.io is an open source container hosting provider that offers flexible solutions built for speed, security and scalability.
Rancher Labs’ recent launch of Longhorn was in response to DevOps’ distress call for a cloud-native persistent storage solution for Kubernetes. At the time, industry pundit Chris Mellor posted that the company had entered into direct competition with its partners Portworx and Storage OS. A healthy dose of coopetition may be more like it.
