Rancher and Kong are excited to present a Master Class that will explore API management combined with universal service meshes and how they support hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

Introducing Rancher KIM, the Kubernetes Image Manager. KIM is a proper Kubernetes client that installs and manages the back-end services required to support its focus on delivering a `docker build` (and related image management) compatible experience to your development workflow. This means you can download the KIM executable for your client platform and run `kim build --tag your/image:tag .`, just as you would invoke `docker build`, and have the image immediately available on your single-node K3s cluster. There's no need to push the image to an external repository nor export it to a tarball and then import it into K3s containerd.

Rancher simplifies the deployment and management of monitoring (Prometheus) and observability (Istio) on a cluster to cluster basis. Each of these tools have extensions that allow for global view and global access. With the recent introduction of Fleet, Rancher 2.5 has reduced the barrier to entry for these configurations, making them available to organizations running at any scale.

As companies adopt containers and Kubernetes to accelerate application development, they’re wrestling with securing this new attack surface. Fortunately, the declarative, immutable nature of Kubernetes environments provides inherent security opportunities, and Kubernetes itself offers a broad set of native controls. However, these protections are not enabled by default, and many organizations are learning both the infrastructure aspects and the security aspects of Kubernetes in parallel.

In this master class Support Engineer Matthew Mattox will address the new Docker Hub limits and how to reduce the number of pull requests made against Docker Hub. We will go over different options including building a full registry mirror, and using the standard registry, including the required maintenance tasks, to use a pull-through-cache registry. We will also cover some Enterprise solutions (e.g. JFrog) along with how to reduce the number of pulls while using Docker Hub.

In this master class Matt Mattox, Principal Support Engineer at Rancher (now a part of SUSE), will address the high-level steps required to plan and perform a Rancher and Kubernetes upgrade. We will go over planning the upgrade and selecting versions. Then we’ll plan out the change controls needed for the upgrade, including the required maintenance windows. We will also walk through different upgrades, including rolling back from a failed upgrade. Finally, We will cover how to automate upgrades.