Enterprises continue to invest heavily in modernizing their IT infrastructure. That leaves network administrators and NOC analysts challenged with effectively monitoring an evolving digital landscape. The goal becomes to meet the service needs of customers and ensure the underlying infrastructure is resilient.
Pop quiz, hotshot. How much does it cost to build a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster? Quick, no conferring. If you thought the answer was “nothing”, go to the back of the class. According to distributed systems expert Cindy Sridharan, quoted in Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, the answer is “one million dollars”: It takes well over a million dollars just in engineer salary to get Kubernetes up and running from scratch. And you still might not get there.
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.
