With the explosion of microservices and Kubernetes, enterprises have recognized the importance of empowering developers to productionize their software. However, most companies still have separate Ops/DevOps teams and software teams. Why is that?

It’s often considered hard to use persistent storage correctly with Kubernetes. The concepts of Volume, PV, PVC, Storage Class; the implication of read-write-once vs read-write-many; the difference between Deployment vs StatefulSet are each obstacles for users to fully understand Kubernetes’s persistent storage.

The three pillars of observability are metrics, logs, and traces. To get a complete view into your applications as well as the Kubernetes platform they run on, you need to be looking at all the different perspectives. In this session, we will look at each pillar to see how we can use the information collected to understand what is happening in our environment today and how to troubleshoot the problems we experience tomorrow. We will share how to do this using various open source tools as well as using the Datadog platform.

We are excited to announce support for Istio with Rancher 2.3 in Preview mode.

Ready to get some training on using K3s, the lightweight Kubernetes distribution?Earlier this year, Rancher Labs introduced k3s, a new open source project which is a lightweight implementation of Kubernetes that is easy to install and can run on x86 and ARM infrastructure with only 512 MB of RAM required to run it. It is geared towards teams that need to deploy applications quickly and reliably to resource-constrained environments. Some use cases for k3s are edge, Single Board Computers, IoT, and CI.

Understanding how to monitor the "Golden Signals" of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in your Kubernetes cluster(s) is an important skill for any engineer, especially for Day 2 Operations. Fortunately, there are some very useful, powerful, and open source tools and technologies out there for accomplishing these tasks. This training session will go over how to monitor these "Golden Signals" in a Kubernetes cluster using Prometheus and Slack.

Remember when working with containers was fun and simple? When it didn't require a doctorate to run an application? Rancher Labs remembers too, and we've created Rio to bring us back to those days.

As more container deployments move into production there will be an increasing level of attacks on application containers and the orchestration tools to manage them. The success of Kubernetes has been a major enabler for the “service mesh” concept to become a reality, as a “sidecar” container is the ideal form-factor for service mesh functions to be placed together with the service itself. The important thing to remember is that, although a service mesh has security features, it is NOT a security solution. It is not designed to provide the type of network, endpoint and host security required for defense in depth.

We all have gone through the introductory talks about Istio, but there is some confusion on how you can bring Istio in to a full production environment. In this master class, we will help you understand this journey of bringing Istio into a production environment and how it differs from your testing environments.

Rancher Labs is excited to announce the preview of Rancher 2.3.0 with support for Windows containers for Windows Server 2019 and Kubernetes 1.14.