Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Rancher Desktop v0.3.0 Release

We are happy to share the v0.3.0 release of Rancher Desktop. This release brings more stability, some new features, and a fresh look to the UI. This screenshot shows the preferences screen while in dark mode on Mac. In the lower left corner the status when performing an action is now displayed. This status will tell you when Rancher Desktop needs to download something, such as a version of Kubernetes you have now used before, or when another step is happening.

Rancher Desktop - An Open Source App for Desktop Kubernetes and Container Management

For those of us who need to get applications running in Kubernetes, having Kubernetes on the desktop is incredibly useful. When we want to focus on our applications, it’s especially useful when Kubernetes is easy to use. This is where Rancher Desktop comes in. Rancher Desktop provides easy-to-use Kubernetes and container management (something we’ll look at in a moment) for Mac and Windows. Having Kubernetes isn’t enough.

Announcing Harvester Beta Availability

It has been five months since we announced project Harvester, open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software built using Kubernetes. Since then, we’ve received a lot of feedback from the early adopters. This feedback has encouraged us and helped in shaping Harvester’s roadmap. Today, I am excited to announce the Harvester v0.2.0 release, along with the Beta availability of the project!

Introduction to K3s

Whether you’re new to the cloud native space or an accomplished practitioner, you’re probably aware that there are many Kubernetes distributions to choose from. Maybe you’ve heard about the challenges of getting up and running with Kubernetes. Guess what? It doesn’t have to be hard. This blog provides an introduction to K3s, a lightweight CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution. We’ll look at what makes K3s different from other Kubernetes distributions.

Introducing Kubewarden, an Open Source Policy Engine

Security has always been a wide and complex topic. A recent survey from StackRox about the state of containers and Kubernetes security provides some interesting data on these topics. In this blog post, I’ll dive into some of the findings in that survey and introduce you to Kubewarden, an open source policy engine. A staggering 66 percent of the survey participants do not feel confident enough in the security measures they have in place.

What Comes After Kubernetes?

You probably can’t believe I’m asking that question. It’s like showing up to a party and immediately asking about the afterparty. Is it really time to look for the exit? No…but yes. We used to deploy apps on systems in data centers. Then we moved the systems to the cloud. Then we moved the apps to containers. Then we wrapped it all in Kubernetes for orchestration, and here we are. Each advance in technology unlocks doors we couldn’t reach before.

April Online Meetup - Hypper: Dependency-aware package management for Kubernetes

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.

Kubernetes Master Class - How to Update Monitoring After Upgrading to Rancher 2.5

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.