DEVOPSdigest

Rancher Labs announced key new capabilities with Rancher 2.5 including a new installation experience, GitOps at scale for edge clusters, full lifecycle management of EKS clusters and a new security-hardened, certified Kubernetes distribution for government customers.

“Exploding on-premise, public cloud and edge Kubernetes use cases are creating massive container sprawl,” said Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs. “With Rancher 2.5, we continue to deliver on our computing everywhere strategy by providing customers a simple and consistent way to deploy and manage containerized applications using any certified Kubernetes distribution, across any infrastructure, regardless of whether they are managing one cluster or one million.”

Rancher 2.5 delivers major new capabilities that simplify and enhance the Kubernetes user experience, whether the user is starting with a single, local cluster or managing many clusters across a hybrid cloud infrastructure. New capabilities include:

■ Installation on Any Cluster: Rancher 2.5 can now be installed on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster, eliminating the need to set up a separate Kubernetes cluster before installing Rancher. The new lightweight, streamlined installation experience is especially valuable for users who already have access to a cloud-managed Kubernetes service like EKS. Other key enhancements include:

- Cluster Management – As Kubernetes distributions become increasingly commoditized, the ability to install Rancher on any certified Kubernetes cluster​ creates immediate access to Rancher’s rich cluster management capabilities including monitoring, alerting, logging, security scanning, service mesh and persistent storage.

- New Cluster Dashboard – Both developers and operations teams can inspect the performance of individual clusters in order to gain operational value from them.

- Enhanced Monitoring and Logging – Rancher 2.5 introduces major updates to application monitoring and logging capabilities, enabling developers and operators to quickly identify bottlenecks and resolve issues.

■ GitOps at Scale for Edge Clusters: Following the success of K3s, the popular lightweight Kubernetes distribution built for resource-constrained environments, organizations are deploying applications across potentially 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 growing demand for application deployment and management at scale, Rancher Labs’ Fleet open source project, announced earlier this year, is now integrated and generally available in Rancher 2.5. Key capabilities of Fleet include:

- GitOps capabilities delivered at scale, enabling users to leverage a Git repository to store and manage application and Kubernetes resource configurations.

- Application packages that can be associated with an individual or a group of clusters, up to 1 million.

- Accelerated agile transformation resulting from streamlining application delivery across any infrastructure in any location.

■ Full Lifecycle Management for Amazon EKS Clusters: Rancher was the first Kubernetes management platform that supported Amazon EKS. Rancher 2.5 cements Rancher’s industry leadership by being the only product that offers full lifecycle management of EKS clusters. With full lifecycle management, users have full access to built-in EKS capabilities such as node groups and rolling upgrades. As EKS continues to develop, Rancher is committed to exposing the full built-in capabilities of EKS to the user.

In addition to preserving the ever-expanding built-in capabilities of EKS, Rancher 2.5 enhances the EKS user experience with capabilities including advanced observability, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarking, push-button Istio service mesh, integrated OPA Gatekeeper and simplified autoscaling.

■ Security Hardening for Public Sector Applications: To better support the growing popularity of Kubernetes for public sector applications, Rancher 2.5 introduces RKE Government, a FIPS-enabled, security-hardened derivative of RKE, Rancher’s popular certified Kubernetes distribution. RKE Government is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution ideal for government agencies around the globe that require FIPS-specific security for their cloud-native applications.