Container management software provider Rancher Labs has released a technical preview of version 2.0 of Rancher, its application used to manage containers.
Sheng Liang (below right), chief executive and co-founder of the company, told iTWire that with the latest release one could manage all Kubernetes clusters under a single Rancher instance.
Containers allow the packaging and isolation of applications with all the files they need to run. They can be easily moved between development, testing and production environments without any loss of functionality.
Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications It was originally designed by Google and later donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
{loadposition sam08}With the Rancher 2.0 technical preview 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.
The current version of Rancher, 1.0, powers more than 10,000 Docker clusters, over a thousand of which run 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," a statement from Rancher said.
"The Rancher community and our partner ecosystem is incredibly active," Liang said,
"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."
Canonical vice-president of development Dustin Kirkland said with Canonical's experience deploying Kubernetes on Ubuntu in the enterprise, "we see first-hand the tremendous opportunity for Rancher 2.0 to solve container management at scale".
The new release included the following features:
- Manage Kubernetes everywhere: Rancher 2.0 enables users to manage existing Kubernetes clusters from cloud service providers like Google Container Engine, as well as clusters running on-premises.
- Multi-cluster management: Rancher 2.0 provides centralised management of user authentication, monitoring and health checks to give IT administrators increased visibility and control. The container management platform leverages role-based access control capabilities in Kubernetes to provide shared cluster and host access to users.
- Improved user experience: The Rancher user experience has been 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 use on their laptop on production Kubernetes clusters.
- Enriched application catalogue: The Rancher catalogue has been extended to support Docker Compose, Kubernetes templates and Helm charts, giving users access to even more containerised applications.