In a previous post, we explained the concept of configuration management and presented three of the most popular tools: Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. We also briefly explored the impact that containerization is having on configuration management, and how the two can be used in combination. This article takes a more in-depth look at this relationship by presenting different techniques for using Chef, Puppet, and Ansible to deploy and manage a Kubernetes cluster.

There should be no doubt anymore that containers are revolutionizing the world of application development and leading the charge for purpose-built cross-cloud and hybrid-cloud topologies. There are other virtualization platforms that solved problems in server consolidation and data center optimization, but in the new world of cloud and mobility, proprietary monolithic middleware may have had its day.

I’m excited to announce the release of Rancher 2.2 Preview 2, which contains a number of powerful features for day two operations on Kubernetes clusters. Please visit our release page or the release notes to learn more about all of the features we shipped today. In this article I introduce one of the features: multi-cluster applications. Read on to learn how this will dramatically reduce your workload and increase the reliability of multi-cluster operations.

Gatsby is currently generating a ton of buzz as the new hot thing for generating static sites. This has lead to a number of frequent questions like: A static…what now? How is GraphQL involved? Do I need to set up a GraphQL server? What if I’m not a great React developer, really more of a bad React developer?

We are excited about Calico v3.5 release. This release provides more control and allows much finer-grained dynamic IP management vs the static allocation of a fixed set of addresses to each node in native Kubernetes. Here are the details.