DEVOPSdigest

Rancher Labs announced the availability of the technical preview of Rancher 2.0.

This latest release makes it possible to manage all Kubernetes clusters under a single Rancher instance. Users can stand up and manage new Kubernetes clusters using the Rancher Kubernetes distribution or import existing Kubernetes clusters, including hosted container services such as Google Container Engine.

Rancher 1.0 is currently powering more than ten thousand Docker clusters, over a thousand of which are running Kubernetes. Beginning with Rancher 2.0, every cluster will now be based on Kubernetes. This makes it even easier for users to take advantage of the power of Kubernetes, as well as its rapidly growing ecosystem. By providing a simple and intuitive user experience built on Kubernetes, Rancher 2.0 will accelerate adoption of Kubernetes within the enterprise.

New features in Rancher 2.0 include:

- Manage Kubernetes everywhere: With cloud providers increasingly offering Kubernetes clusters as a service, users no longer need to create their own clusters. Rancher 2.0 enables users to manage existing Kubernetes clusters from cloud service providers like Google Container Engine (GKE), as well as clusters running on-premises.

- Multi-cluster management: Rancher 2.0 provides centralized management of user authentication, monitoring and health checks to give IT administrators increased visibility and control. The container management platform leverages the sophisticated role based access control (RBAC) capabilities in Kubernetes to provide shared cluster and host access to users.

- Improved user experience: The market-leading Rancher user experience has been significantly enhanced to bring the simplicity of Docker command line and the elegance of Docker Compose to Kubernetes. Users can now have the same experience they love on their laptop on production Kubernetes clusters.

- Enriched application catalog: The Rancher catalog has been extended to support Docker Compose, Kubernetes templates and Helm charts, giving users access to even more containerized applications.

“The Rancher community and our partner ecosystem is incredibly active,” said Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs. “Our team is fortunate to regularly receive feedback and requests on desired features and support items. In Rancher 2.0, we are dramatically improving Kubernetes support, making day-to-day Kubernetes use incredibly simple to accelerate adoption of Kubernetes in the enterprise.”