Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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.

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.

Edge computing has become a clear strategic goal for many enterprises, for some it is already an absolute necessity. As the demands of applications software and the capabilities of hardware continue to grow, containers and Kubernetes have become a compelling technology for edge computing. In just the past 5 years, the way that software is manufactured and maintained has changed dramatically with the introduction of Kubernetes container orchestration.

Support for relational databases is a growing focus for Kubernetes users, and the release of Windows Server 2019 is expanding options for .NET applications and SQL Server. SQL Server workloads, however, often rely on Active Directory and Windows Auth, and storage arrays, which will not be supported by SQL Server containers on Windows Server 2019. Fortunately, a new Rancher Labs partner, Windocks, offers new options for SQL Server on Kubernetes and Rancher.

K3s and Traefik are partnering to speed up cloud native applications deployment. K3s, by Rancher, is the best way to have a lightweight, fully CNCF conformant Kubernetes cluster running on diverse infrastructures, including possible IoT appliances such as Raspberry Pis. K3s starts in seconds thanks to its light weight nature. As it adds some components to the cluster automatically, k3s is very easy to use and therefore very accessible for new users.

Rancher Rodeos are great events for learning Kubernetes and Rancher beginner-level concepts, with attendees gaining just the right amount of knowledge to get started with provisioning Kubernetes clusters and launching applications. I present frequently at Rodeos, and the scene typically unfolds like this: together with attendees, we are walking through Rancher features, and usually as we’re experimenting with Monitoring, Alerting, and Logging, I see the wheels start turning in their heads.

The Rancher community is 30,000+ strong and growing fast! In order to continue growing and nurturing our vibrant open source community, we’ve created the Trusted Ranch Hand Program. Trusted Ranch Hands are a select group of knowledgeable ranchers ready, willing, and able to help other Ranchers as we all adopt DevOps practices and principles using Rancher, Kubernetes, and related technologies that help us all Run Kubernetes Everywhere!

When we started Rancher in 2014, our vision was to enable enterprise IT to procure and utilize computing resources (“cattle”) from any infrastructure provider. We were extremely lucky to be able to leverage wonderful technologies like Kubernetes which made computing resources consistent across all infrastructure providers.