In this session of the Kubernetes Master Class Series, we will cover the networking internals of Windows Server worker nodes and Windows Server Containers. The focus will be on the supported networking configurations with Flannel and Rancher 2.3. We will also cover differences between Linux and Windows networking and how to get started with troubleshooting issues that may arise.

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for deploying containerized applications at scale on the different cloud providers. Why is this? In this Kubernetes Master Class, we'll discuss the reasons for using Kubernetes (K8s), the core concepts, architecture, real-life scenarios, and the differences betwen using managed vs un-managed K8s solutions, and how to reduce costs by using cloud excess capacity.

Kubernetes enables a common compute platform across any infrastructure and a consistent set of infrastructure capabilities including improved reliability, enhanced security and increased operational efficiencies. But as organizations adopt Kubernetes, clusters are often deployed with limited access to shared tooling and services, inconsistent security policies and no centralized cluster operations.

Rancher 2.3 is the command center for every Kubernetes cluster. This video highlights the enterprise features in this release.

Vault operation is hard enough already, let alone with needing to add new applications, new policies, new databases... But if I automate my secrets, that defeats the purpose of storing it securely in vault. This class aims to show some simple ways of adding automation to your vault operation to help reduce operator toil and give a standardized way of having developers add new applications via a GitOps flow.

Enterprises interested in modernizing SQL Server with Kubernetes are often challenged by dependencies on Active Directory and Windows Auth, storage networks, and other SQL Server infrastructure and security policies. The introduction of Windows Server for Kubernetes offers little to address these needs.

Infrastructure-as-Code, a DevOps best practice, is a workflow that involves managing and configuring your environments through source control. This allows teams to move faster and with fewer errors when making changes to production environments. If a mistake does occur, your environment and apps can quickly be reverted back to a previous state. Save time, increase productivity, and reduce the cost of inevitable human error.

As the Kubernetes ecosystem changes at a fast pace, delivering an application in this context is challenging. How do you ensure that your applications run fast and are resilient with all the Kubernetes updates and new features?

As teams start to onboard mission-critical applications such as databases and NoSQL systems into production, there’s a need to address critical Day 2 concerns. Dealing with regulatory requirements, user error, ransomware and cluster upgrades - requires safeguarding of both data and state. In this master class, we'll describe the challenges associated with implementing a robust data management strategy with Kasten's K10 platform and Rancher's RKE.

Earlier this year, Rancher Labs introduced k3s, a new open source project which is a lightweight implementation of Kubernetes that is easy to install and can run on x86 and ARM infrastructure with only 512 MB of RAM required to run it. It is geared towards teams that need to deploy applications quickly and reliably to resource-constrained environments. Some use cases for k3s are edge, Single Board Computers, IoT, and CI.