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.

The Rancher Academy launched on May 15, 2020. Here we are, 94 days later, and we’ve issued our 1,000th certificate to a graduate of the Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1 course. Rancher is open source software, so anyone can download it and use it. With that freedom, though, comes a cost: we all learn how to use it according to how we need to use it. Through this lens, the actual potential of Rancher becomes distorted, and the experience of each individual varies widely.

If you’re a gamer, you probably know how immersed you can get in your favorite game. Or if you’re the parent or partner of a gamer, you probably know what it’s like to try to get the attention of someone who is in “gaming mode.” Creating worlds and enriching players’ lives is in Ubisoft’s DNA.

In the pre-Kubernetes, pre-container world, backup and recovery solutions were generally implemented at the virtual machine (VM) level. That works for traditional applications when an application runs on a single VM. But when applications are containerized and managed with an orchestrator like Kubernetes, this system falls apart. That means effective disaster recovery (DR) plans for Kubernetes must be designed for containerized architectures and natively understand the way Kubernetes functions.

Let’s imagine you are running a hosting shop with highly visible production applications. Your team has backups, and you have a disaster recovery (DR) policy. You think you are ready to handle any real-world scenario in addition to checking all your compliance boxes. Your third-party backup tools are creating backups, and your implemented solutions have a brochure indicating restore capability.