Take a deep dive with Staff Engineer Luther Monson into the new node pool scale down feature recently released in Rancher v2.5.6. This masterclass will walk you through everything you will need to know to go from zero to a scaling Kubernetes cluster using Rancher. We will explore using the cluster autoscaler in tandem with this new feature to scale pools on demand. Watch a full demo of a cluster sizing up and down to load while using a custom cloud provider built for the Rancher API.

Learn how Harvester, SUSE's new HCI platform, can be deployed across bare metal notes with the Tinkerbell provisioning engine.

Office Hour, Week 1: Accelerate Dev Workflows with special guest Thorsten Klein, k3d maintainer!

Introducing Hypper, a new package manager for Kubernetes designed with cluster administrators in mind. Hypper is built on Helm and charts but makes some different assumptions around multi-tenancy and dependent charts (which can be useful with CRD handling). Where Helm assumes a user could be one of many users running in multi-tenant, Hypper assumes the user is a cluster administrator managing a cluster.

Rancher 2.5 introduces a new, improved monitoring integration. It is still based on Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager, but much more flexible regarding configuration options and customizations. It also directly ships with much improved dashboards and alerting rules. Unfortunately, due to the necessary internal changes, there is no automatic upgrade path available from the old to the new monitoring. While you can continue to use the old monitoring with 2.5, there are some manual migration steps necessary to get all the benefits from the new monitoring system and keep all the configurations and customizations from the old one.

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.