Today we launched the Rancher Academy, our new free training portal. The first course is Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1, and in it you’ll learn exactly how to deploy Rancher and use it to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters. This professional certification program is designed to help Kubernetes practitioners demonstrate their knowledge and competence with Kubernetes and Rancher – and to advance in their careers.

For teams that deal with machine learning (ML), there comes a point in time where training a model on a single machine becomes untenable. This is often followed by the sudden realization that there is more to machine learning than simply model training. There are a myriad of activities that have to happen before, during and after model training. This is especially true for teams that want to productionize their ML models.

This article will describe the process of installing Rancher 2.4 on a highly available K3s Kubernetes cluster in Microsoft Azure. It will also take advantage of Microsoft Azure Database for MySQL, which removes the dependency on etcd and provides us all the additional features that Azure delivers with this service. You will learn how to deploy the infrastructure to support this pattern using only the Azure Cloud Shell.

Kubernetes is hugely popular and growing, and is primarily used on the cloud — 83 percent of organizations included in a large CNCF survey said they run Kubernetes on at least one public cloud. Amazon is a natural option for Kubernetes clusters, due to its mature and robust infrastructure, and a variety of deployment options with a varying degree of automation.