Today Rancher Labs released the latest version of its eponymous software with the release of Rancher 2.5. Being a Kubernetes management platform, the latest upgrades and capabilities are going to surround Kubernetes including an enhanced single cluster management experience, application deployment at scale expanded, expanded cloud distribution support, and a new security hardened, certified Kubernetes distribution. The latest update accelerates the company’s ‘Computing Everywhere’ vision and Rancher Labs intends to strengthen its leadership in multi-cluster, multi-cloud, heterogeneous container management.
Today Rancher Labs released the latest version of its eponymous software with the release of Rancher 2.5. Being a Kubernetes management platform, the latest upgrades and capabilities are going to surround Kubernetes including an enhanced single cluster management experience, application deployment at scale expanded, expanded cloud distribution support, and a new security hardened, certified Kubernetes distribution. The latest update accelerates the company’s ‘Computing Everywhere’ vision and Rancher Labs intends to strengthen its leadership in multi-cluster, multi-cloud, heterogeneous container management.
Kubernetes is continuing to be rapidly adopting and utilized with no end in sight. While this container orchestration method has many benefits it still can use a bit of fine tuning. Rancher 2.5 is here to simplify and enhance users experience. The first new features we going to look at center on clusters and managing them. With 2.5, Rancher is now installable on any cluster. The update gives users a rich management experience on any cluster and want granular cluster observability in order to identify and fix issues quickly. Other enhancements for managing and controlling clusters include:
- Installation – Rancher is now installable on any certified Kubernetes cluster, creating a simple entry point into all the value of Rancher and the entire Kubernetes ecosystem including monitoring, alerting, logging, security scanning, service mesh and persistent storage.
- Cluster Dashboard – a new dashboard allows both developers and operations teams to inspect the performance of individual clusters in order to gain operational value from them.
- Monitoring & Logging – Rancher 2.5 introduces major updates to application monitoring and logging capabilities, enabling developers and operators to identify bottlenecks and resolve issues quickly.
Rancher Labs announced K3s at KubeCon EU 2019. K3s is a popular lightweight Kubernetes distribution built for resource constrained environments. With the explosion at the edge, there will be lots of opportunities to leverage these distributions in possibly tens of thousands of clusters in a variety of edge locations including remote branch offices, factory equipment, train control units, commercial and military aircraft guidance systems, satellite navigation systems, wind farms and retail stores. To address this, Rancher 2.5 has introduced the following capabilities of Rancher Labs’ Fleet:
- Delivers GitOps capabilities at scale by enabling users to leverage a Git repository to store and manage application and Kubernetes resource configurations.
- Application packages can then be associated with an individual or a group of clusters, up to 1 million.
- By streamlining application delivery across any infrastructure in any location, enterprises can use Rancher 2.5 to accelerate their journey towards true digital transformation.
AWS has given those that are looking to start using Kubernetes an easier method with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) certified. Rancher Labs wants to provide a simple and consistent experience for managing any certified Kubernetes distribution. This includes public clouds like AWS. New abilities for Amazon EKS include:
- The ability to import, provision and manage all your Amazon EKS clusters from a single pane of glass.
- Full lifecycle management of Amazon EKS clusters including node management, rolling upgrades, advanced observability, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarking, push-button Istio service mesh, integrated OPA Gatekeeper and simplified autoscaling.
The last enhancements are around security. As Kubernetes is gaining popularity, particularly in the public sector, more security issues will arise. To help combat this, Rancher 2.5 introduces RKE Government, a FIPS compliant, security-hardened derivative of RKE, Rancher’s popular certified Kubernetes distribution. According to the company, RKE Government is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution and empowers declarative cloud-native workflows on bare metal, cloud or air gap. RKE Government allows U.S. government agencies to adopt a stronger, compliance-based security posture when defending their cloud-native applications.
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