BiB091: Rancher Open Source K8s Management Releases 2.4

The following is a transcript of the audio you can hear in the podcast player above.
Welcome to Briefings In Brief. I had a briefing with Rancher on March 26th, 2020 about their 2.4 release.
Who’s Rancher? Rancher is focused on making Kubernetes easier. Kubernetes management. A Kubernetes control-plane, if you will. Rancher is in the same area as IBM Red Hat’s OpenShift and VMware with the Pacific and Tanzu products.
Much of what Rancher does is open source, so you can get your feet wet with the Rancher family for free.
Rancher has announced version 2.4, which might seem like…meh…no big deal. Companies publish incremental software releases all the time. Well, I think Rancher 2.4 is interesting because it indicates where Kubernetes is heading.
That is…Kubernetes everywhere, running production workloads. In your data center. At the edge. In the public cloud. On installations as small as a single node cluster (let’s pretend that’s not an oxymoron) and as large as you can likely imagine.
Rancher 2.4 Announcement
That’s a lot of Kubernetes clusters to manage, and Rancher is gearing up for this coming reality in 2.4. The platform has been rearchitected to support 2,000 clusters and 100,000 nodes in this release. Which is just the beginning. Support for a million or more clusters is coming.
Another key Rancher announcement is zero-downtime maintenance for RKE, the Rancher Kubernetes engine. You pick the number of worker nodes you’d like to upgrade at once, configure your upgrade strategy, and then off you go upgrading your production environment.
Rancher has also enhanced cluster security, which they are terming “production grade security”. The new features allow you to ensure that clusters are secured according to industry best practices. How? Using 2.4’s new CIS Scan feature to see how your RKE cluster is doing against over 100 tests from the CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes.
And the final announcement from the Rancher folks is Hosted Rancher. You know…if you don’t want to manage Rancher server yourself, they’ll do it for you. You get a hosted Rancher Server management control plane, and it’s a full-featured Rancher server with a 99.9% SLA for the hosted service itself. I mean, not 99.9% SLA for your application, because hey, that’s still your problem.
Remember what I said about Rancher as a company. A lot of what they are offering is open source, but they offer what they call “enterprise grade support”–the same model a lot of companies based on open source follow.
For More Information
To learn more about Rancher, visit rancher.com, and if you ring them up, tell them you heard about them on the Packet Pushers podcast network. And that was Briefings in Brief, helping you keep up with the vendor announcements we find most interesting.