Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

k3sup: From zero to KUBECONFIG in < 1 min K3s is an open-source, lightweight Kubernetes distribution by Rancher that was introduced this year and has gained huge popularity. People not only like the concept behind it, but also the awesome work that the team has done to strip down the heavy Kubernetes distribution to a minimal level. Though k3s started as a POC project for local Kubernetes development, its development has led people to use it even at a production level.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked by a sales rep the following question: “The customer has looked at Stackalytics and is wondering why Rancher doesn’t have as many code commits as the competition. What do I say?” For those of you unfamiliar with Stackalytics, it provides an activity snapshot, a developer selfie if you will, of commits and lines of code changed in different open source projects.

The holy grail for any CMO looking for their next gig is to find the perfect combination of addressable market, market timing, company, and product. That’s why I am so excited to be joining the team at Rancher Labs, the leader in container management software. Let’s look at all the variables.

Back in May we did a soft-launch of The RanchCast. We debuted it as a Twitch stream and produced a couple of episodes that you can now find on The RanchCast YouTube channel. After those episodes aired, I went through the feedback from the community and other streamers. Now we’re ready to re-launch.

This week Rancher Labs announced a record 161% year-on-year revenue growth, along with a 52% increase in the number of customers in the first half of 2019. Other highlights from H1’19 included: You can find the complete release here. We are grateful to our community of customers, partners, and users for the growth we achieved in the first half of 2019, and we will continue to gauge Rancher’s success in the larger context of enterprise adoption of Kubernetes.

Today we are announcing support for Istio with Rancher 2.3 in Preview mode. Istio, and service mesh generally, has developed a huge amount of excitement in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Istio promises to add fault tolerance, canary rollouts, A/B testing, monitoring and metrics, tracing and observability, and authentication and authorization, eliminating the need for developers to instrument or write specific code to enable these capabilities.

This is the third of a series of three articles focusing on Kubernetes security: the outside attack, the inside attack, and dealing with resource consumption or noisy neighbors. A concern for many administrators setting up a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster is how to prevent a co-tenant from becoming a “noisy neighbor,” one who monopolizes CPU, memory, storage and other resources.

Kubernetes clusters use multiple certificates to provide both encryption of traffic to the Kubernetes components as well as authentication of these requests. These certificates are auto-generated for clusters launched by Rancher and also clusters launched by the Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) CLI.

This post outlines how to build a production-grade ingress solution using Citrix ADC on Rancher. Customers can confidently expose end user traffic to microservices or legacy workloads on Kubernetes clusters on Rancher using this solution.

Containers, along with containerization technology like Docker and Kubernetes, have become increasingly common components in many developers’ toolkits. The goal of containerization, at its core, is to offer a better way to create, package, and deploy software across different environments in a predictable and easy-to-manage way.