Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2020

From Web Scale to Edge Scale: Rancher 2.4 Supports 2,000 Clusters on its Way to 1 Million

Rancher 2.4 is here – with new under-the-hood changes that pave the way to supporting up to 1 million clusters. That’s probably the most exciting capability in the new version. But you might ask: why would anyone want to run thousands of Kubernetes clusters – let alone tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or more? At Rancher Labs, we believe the future of Kubernetes is multi-cluster and fully heterogeneous.

Runtime Security in Rancher with Falco

Runtime security for Rancher environments requires putting controls in place to detect unexpected behavior that could be malicious or anomalous. Even with processes in place for vulnerability scanning and implementing pod security policies and network policies in Rancher, not every risk will be addressed. You still need mechanisms to confirm these security barriers are effective and provide a last line of defense when they fail.

Kubernetes Master Class: Monitoring and Alerting with Prometheus & Grafana

Rancher users and operators can collect custom metrics, automate alerts, notifications, and actions, and create cluster and project-level dashboards. In this class, you'll learn how to setup alerts with Rancher and Prometheus Alert Manager to find problems in your clusters before there's an outage. You'll also learn to visualize metrics for Kubernetes and for your applications so you can gather new insights to your users' usage patterns and your applications' run-time behaviors.

Getting Started with Longhorn Distributed Block Storage and Cloud-Native Distributed SQL

Longhorn is cloud-native distributed block storage for Kubernetes that is easy to deploy and upgrade, 100 percent open source and persistent. Longhorn’s built-in incremental snapshot and backup features keep volume data safe, while its intuitive UI makes scheduling backups of persistent volumes easy to manage. Using Longhorn, you get maximum granularity and control, and can easily create a disaster recovery volume in another Kubernetes cluster and fail over to it in the event of an emergency.

Custom Alerts Using Prometheus Queries

Prometheus is an open-source system for monitoring and alerting originally developed by Soundcloud. It moved to Cloud Native Computing Federation (CNCF) in 2016 and became one of the most popular projects after Kubernetes. It can monitor everything from an entire Linux server to a stand-alone web server, a database service or a single process. In Prometheus terminology, the things it monitors are called Targets. Each unit of a target is called a metric.

Enhancing Kubernetes Security with Pod Security Policies, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, we demonstrated how to enable PSPs in Rancher, using restricted PSP policy as default. We also showed how this prevented a privileged pod from being admitted to the cluster. Enforcement capabilities of a Pod Security Policy We intentionally omitted particular details about role-based access control (RBAC) and how to link pods with specific PSPs. Let’s move on and dig in more on PSPs.

Telstra Ventures Invests in Rancher!

Today, we announced our $40M funding round led by Telstra Ventures. We have been working with Telstra as a customer for many years. When Telstra Ventures, who was familiar with Telstra’s success in using Rancher and Kubernetes, approached us for a potential funding round, it was a no-brainer. A leading telco like Telstra exemplifies Rancher’s vision to Run Kubernetes Everywhere.

Kubernetes Master Class: Deploy WordPress and MySQL without Data Loss

Applications such as WordPress or MySQL require the use of data persistence. It is common when deploying such applications to use a HostPath volume as it is agnostic from the platform. A HostPath volume shares the filesystem of the Host within the container making the data available between pod restarts. However, it ties the data to one node only, creating a single point of failure and restricting any kind of scalability. Kubernetes is not able to schedule the application in any other node even if it is unavailable. This leads to eventual data loss.

AI Meets Kubernetes: Install JupyterHub with Rancher

AI and Machine Learning are becoming critical differentiators in the technology landscape. By their nature, AI and ML are computation hungry workloads. They require best-in-class distributed computing environments to thrive. AI and ML present a perfect use case for Kubernetes, the distributed computing platform engineered at Google to run their massive workloads.

Transforming Telematics with Kubernetes and Rancher

Norwegian leader in fleet management, equipment and vehicle tracking, ABAX is one of Europe’s fastest-growing technology businesses. The company provides sophisticated fleet tracking, electronic mileage logs and equipment and vehicle control systems to more than 26,500 customers. ABAX manages over 250,000 active subscriptions that connect a variety of vehicles and industrial equipment subscriptions.

Kubernetes Master Class: Getting started with Pod Security Policies and best practices in Production

Kubernetes Pod Security Policies (PSPs) is an enforcement mechanism to ensure that Pods run only with the appropriate privileges and can solely access the appropriate resources. You can leverage them as a threat prevention mechanism by controlling Pod creation, and limiting the capabilities available to specific users, groups, or applications.

Running Containers in AWS with Rancher

This blog will examine how Rancher improves the life of DevOps teams already invested in AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) but looking to run workloads on-prem, with other cloud providers or, increasingly, at the edge. By reading this blog you will also discover how Rancher helps you escape the undeniable attractions of a vendor monoculture while lowering costs and mitigating risk.

Kubernetes Drives Growth and Innovation in Financial Services

Founded in 2000, the Cardano Group is a privately-owned, purpose-built risk and investment specialist — and a financial pioneer. It is widely recognized as a market leader in the provisioning of specialized services to private-sector and collective pension programs in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Cardano has recently become the third largest retail pension provider in the UK after its recent acquisition of NOW: Pensions.

Enhancing Kubernetes Security with Pod Security Policies, Part 1

Kubernetes Pod Security Policies (PSPs) are a critical component of the Kubernetes security puzzle. Pod Security Policies are clusterwide resources that control security sensitive attributes of pod specification and are a mechanism to harden the security posture of your Kubernetes workloads. Kubernetes platform teams or cluster operators can leverage them to control pod creation and limit the capabilities available to specific users, groups or applications.

March 2020 Online Meetup: Automating K3s Cluster Upgrades

While developing K3s to run at the edge we had to change our assumptions about how to manage these clusters at scale. A key assumption in a data center is that you have stable network connectivity, but this may not be true at the edge. You may have unreliable cellular service or limited time during the day in which you can connect. In these environments, operations such as upgrading Kubernetes or patching an operating system require a different paradigm.

Kubernetes Master Class: How to implement Network Policy to secure your cluster

By default, pods are non-isolated; they accept traffic from any source. The Kubernetes solution to this security concern is Network Policy that lets developers control network access to their services. Rancher comes configured with Network Policy using Project Calico which can be used to secure your clusters. This class will describe a few use cases for network policy and a live demo implementing each use case.