The k3s project was started by Darren Shepherd, Chief Architect at Rancher 7 months ago and has already become one of the most popular Kubernetes options on the CNCF Landscape by number of GitHub stars. To put this into context, k3s is more popular than OpenShift by IBM/Red Hat and only Rancher Kubernetes itself is more popular than k3s. Now stars are indicative of interest and popularity only and that should be noted.
Over the last few years, we have seen a significant shift with companies moving away from developing heavy, monolithic applications and instead adopting new approaches like microservices and even serverless applications. These allow companies to work in a faster and more agile way. Speed and agility are important when a task like deploying a new piece of code to production multiple times a day is normal behavior for a modern environment.
Windows Support went GA for Kubernetes in version 1.14 and represented years of work. This has been the effort of excellent engineers from companies including Microsoft, Pivotal, VMWare, RedHat, and the now-defunct Apprenda, among others. I’ve been a lurker and occasional contributor to the sig-windows community going back to my days with Apprenda, and I’ve continued to follow it in my current role with Rancher Labs.
Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Rancher 2.3, the latest version of our flagship product. Rancher, already the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform, adds major new features with v2.3.
Container technology is transforming the face of business and application development. 70% of on-premises workloads today are running on the Windows Server operating system and enterprise customers are looking to modernize these workloads and make use of containers. We have introduced support for Windows Containers in Windows Server 2016 and graduated support for Windows Server worker nodes in Kubernetes 1.14 clusters. With Windows Server 2019 we have expanded support in Kubernetes 1.16.
