Containers - and Kubernetes - are now a key part of enterprise growth strategy across EMEA. We can see this not only as usage of Rancher grows, but also as the popularity of our local Lighthouse Events increases. In Northern EMEA particularly, the appetite for Kubernetes is accelerating rapidly. How are companies in this region capitalising on Kubernetes?
Today I am very excited to announce that Rancher Labs’ Project Longhorn has been accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a sandbox project. Many Kubernetes users still find it challenging to run stateful workloads and manage persistent storage. Longhorn aims to help you manage stateful workloads in Kubernetes by providing a solution for persistent storage that you can easily deploy, use, and manage.
The k3s project was started by Darren Shepherd, Chief Architect at Rancher 7 months ago and has already become one of the most popular Kubernetes options on the CNCF Landscape by number of GitHub stars. To put this into context, k3s is more popular than OpenShift by IBM/Red Hat and only Rancher Kubernetes itself is more popular than k3s. Now stars are indicative of interest and popularity only and that should be noted.
Over the last few years, we have seen a significant shift with companies moving away from developing heavy, monolithic applications and instead adopting new approaches like microservices and even serverless applications. These allow companies to work in a faster and more agile way. Speed and agility are important when a task like deploying a new piece of code to production multiple times a day is normal behavior for a modern environment.
Windows Support went GA for Kubernetes in version 1.14 and represented years of work. This has been the effort of excellent engineers from companies including Microsoft, Pivotal, VMWare, RedHat, and the now-defunct Apprenda, among others. I’ve been a lurker and occasional contributor to the sig-windows community going back to my days with Apprenda, and I’ve continued to follow it in my current role with Rancher Labs.
Container technology is transforming the face of business and application development. 70% of on-premises workloads today are running on the Windows Server operating system and enterprise customers are looking to modernize these workloads and make use of containers. We have introduced support for Windows Containers in Windows Server 2016 and graduated support for Windows Server worker nodes in Kubernetes 1.14 clusters. With Windows Server 2019 we have expanded support in Kubernetes 1.16.
Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Rancher 2.3, the latest version of our flagship product. Rancher, already the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform, adds major new features with v2.3.
