Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There’s no shortage of providers willing to host your containers. Many of the world’s biggest cloud platforms offer Kubernetes as a service, including features such as automatic scalability and high availability. However, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) stands out as perhaps the best tool for building and hosting a Kubernetes cluster for a number of reasons. In this article, we’ll present these reasons and why GCP offers a better Kubernetes experience than other providers.

Kubernetes Pod Security Policy is a mechanism to enforce best security practices in Kubernetes. In this tutorial, we will explain how to enable Kubernetes Pod Security Policy across your cluster using kube-psp-advisor to address the practical challenges of building an adaptive and fine-grained security policy on Kubernetes in production.

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.

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.

When you are using Rancher to manage your Kubernetes clusters, at some point you will encounter the terms Rancher, RKE, and custom cluster. If you are new to Rancher, it can be difficult to understand the difference between and purpose of each of these concepts. In this post, I will go over what each component is used for and how they are used together in parts of the system.

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.

Etcd is an open-source distributed key-value store created by the CoreOS team, now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is pronounced “et-cee-dee”, making reference to distributing the Unix “/etc” directory, where most global configuration files live, across multiple machines. It serves as the backbone of many distributed systems, providing a reliable way for storing data across a cluster of servers.