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“When I look at the most advanced digital organizations such as Google, Netflix, Amazon and Facebook, they’re running service-orientated architectures, with estates of microservices, completely decoupled from one another but managed centrally. We aspire to reach this point and Rancher is an important part of the journey.” Anthony Andrades, Head of Global Infrastructure Strategy, Schneider Electric

When your company is born in the first Industrial Revolution, how do you stay relevant in the digital age? For Schneider Electric, the answer is continuous innovation, driven by its heritage in the electricity market. Founded in the 1880s, Schneider Electric is a leading provider of energy and automation digital solutions for efficiency and sustainability. Believing access to energy and digital services is a basic human right, Schneider Electric creates integrated solutions for homes, commercial and municipal buildings, data centers and industrial infrastructure. By putting efficiency and sustainability at the heart of the portfolio, the company helps consumers and businesses make the most of their energy resources.

A Digital Transformation Turning Point

Today, Schneider Electric is at a turning point – embarking on a significant transformation by modernizing its legacy systems to create a cluster of cloud-native microservices to become more agile and innovative. The company started its move to the cloud in 2013, with a couple of business-driven projects running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). By 2016, their AWS footprint was global, and an infrastructure migration was underway. At the same time, they were experimenting with Kubernetes but faced some challenges with access control.

In 2018, the company carried out a successful proof of concept (PoC) with Rancher Labs and security partner Aqua. This resulted in deploying Rancher on top of Kubernetes to provide access control, identity management and globalized performance metrics. A year later, Schneider chose Rancher to underpin its container management platform, deploying it on 20 nodes.

The company has been undergoing technical evolution for 25 years, in which they built and deployed thousands of separate services and applications running on Windows Server or Red Hat. Now these services must be re-engineered or rebuilt before migrating to the cloud – a process that they expect to take five years. In 2019, the team started the painstaking process of analyzing the entire estate of applications, categorizing each one according to the most appropriate and efficient way to modernize and migrate.

Successful Migration to Rancher

Over the last year, the team has successfully migrated four applications, which are now managed in 40 nodes with Rancher. With Rancher’s intuitive interface, the team can quickly check the status of clusters without having to manually check performance, workload status or resource usage. The team appreciates that they don’t need to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Read our case study to hear more about Schneider Electric’s technical and cultural transformation and why their relationship with Rancher is critical for success.

CEO and Co-Founder Sheng Liang has a saying about how we approach open source at Rancher Labs: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” When we set out to build something, we don’t know if it will turn into a successful product, spark another product idea or be a good idea that doesn’t get traction. The joy is in the journey.

Take K3s, our lightweight Kubernetes distribution. We didn’t start out developing K3s – it grew organically out of a project called Rio. K3s was inspired by the insight and passion of our developers who saw a need for a Kubernetes distribution for IoT and the edge. These forward thinkers were right. According to Gartner, 75 percent of enterprise data will be created and processed outside of data centers and cloud deployments by 2025.

CRN Recognizes Rancher Labs for Innovation

K3s has influenced other innovative products in the open source community, such as k3sup and k3d. We’re proud that K3s has gained a loyal following and that it continues win accolades. CRN recently included K3s in its roundup of The 10 Coolest Open-Source Software Tools of 2020 (So Far) due to its small binary (under 40 MB) that reduces the dependencies and steps needed to install, run and auto-update a production Kubernetes cluster. CRN recognized K3s and other tools on the list, such as Helm and Envoy, for leading the industry toward greater adoption of agile development and DevOps methods, AI, cloud-native architecture and advanced security.

No doubt the buzz around K3s influenced CRN to include Rancher Labs in another list: the 2020 Emerging Vendors. Honoring “rising technology suppliers that exhibit great promise in shaping the future success of the channel with their dedication to innovation,” CRN’s list provides a resource for solution providers in search of the latest technologies.

At Rancher Labs, partnerships are crucial to our business. We rely on more than 200 solution providers worldwide who deliver customer offerings around our products, including Rancher, our enterprise platform for Kubernetes management. These partners are also innovators, inspired to help their customers do things better.

Being an innovator means knowing you can’t go it alone –- and our ecosystem partners are critical to that. Rancher includes a global catalog of applications that our users can easily integrate into their environments to maximize productivity and reliability.

At the end of the day, we want to make our users’ lives better by making Kubernetes clusters easier to deploy and manage so that they can focus on the business at hand. For most organizations, that’s what innovation is: finding better ways to solve problems.

The idea of letting a thousand flowers bloom means being able to evolve our technologies and take the best parts of the things we’ve developed. Sometimes it means admitting that a technology you love isn’t going to make it. It’s having insight into what technology will best solve customer problems and driving adoption of that technology. For Rancher Labs, embracing open source means embracing the best of innovation –- no matter where it comes from. That’s why we’re 100 percent open source with no vendor lock-in.

As we look to the future of Rancher Labs, one thing is sure. Innovation will continue to be a driving force in everything we do. We’ll continue to plant the seeds of innovation and watch them grow.

I’m excited to announce that Rancher has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by SUSE. Rancher is the most widely used enterprise Kubernetes platform. SUSE is the largest independent open source software company and a leader in enterprise Linux. By combining Rancher and SUSE, we not only gain massive engineering resources to further strengthen our market-leading product, we are also able to preserve our unique 100% open source business model.

We started Rancher 6 years ago to develop the next generation enterprise computing platform built on a relatively new technology called containers. We could not have anticipated the tremendous growth and popularity of the Kubernetes technology. Rancher was able to thrive in this exciting and highly dynamic market because we developed innovative products loved by end users. Grass-roots adoption coupled with a unique enterprise-grade support subscription led to our hypergrowth. I want to thank everyone who has used our products over these last six years for your support, and for helping us build an amazing community of users.

After the acquisition closes later this year, I will lead the combined engineering and innovation organization at SUSE. You can expect an accelerated pace of product innovation. And given SUSE’s 28-year history building a highly successful open source business, our commitment to open source will remain strong.

The acquisition is great for Rancher customers and partners. At Rancher we take pride in our industry-leading customer satisfaction with an NPS score of over 80. SUSE’s global reach and enterprise focus will further strengthen our commitment to customers who rely on Rancher to power mission-critical workloads. Likewise, SUSE’s strong ecosystem will greatly accelerate Rancher’s on-going efforts to transform how organizations adopt cloud native technology.

This acquisition is a launch point for further growth of Rancher. I feel as invigorated as day-1 about the industry, the technology, and our business. I am so proud of our team and the work they have done these last six years, and I look forward to continuing to work with our users, customers, partners, and fellow Ranchers to build a truly amazing business by leveraging the best parts of Rancher and SUSE. Rancher and SUSE together will be the enterprise computing company that transforms our industry.

“As our business grew, we knew there would be economies in working with an orchestration partner. Rancher and Kubernetes have become enablers for the growth of our business.” – Joost Hofman, Head of Site Reliability Engineering Digital Development, Albert Heijn

When it comes to deciding where and how to shop for food, consumers have a choice. And it may only take one negative experience with a retailer for a consumer to take their business elsewhere. For food retail leader Albert Heijn, customer satisfaction and innovation at its 950+ retail stores and e-commerce site are driving forces. As the top food retailer in the Netherlands (and with stores in Belgium), the company works to inspire, surprise and provide rewarding experiences to its customers – and has a mission to be the most loved and healthiest company in the Netherlands.

Adopting Containers for Innovation and Scalability

Not surprisingly, the fastest growing part of Albert Heijn’s business is its e-commerce site – with millions of visitors each year and expectations for those numbers to double in the coming years. With a focus on the future of grocery shopping and sustainability, Albert Heijn is at the forefront of container adoption in the retail space. Since first experimenting with containers in 2016, they are now the preferred way for the company’s 200 developers to manage the continuous development process and run many services on e-commerce site AH.nl in production. By using containers, developers can push new features to the e-commerce site faster – improving customer experience and loyalty.

Before adopting containers, Hofman’s team ran a traditional, monolithic infrastructure that was costly and unwieldy. With a vision of unified microservices and an open API to support future growth, they started experimenting with containers in 2016. While they experienced uptime of 99.95 percent after just six months, they faced other challenges and realized they needed a container management solution.

In 2018, Hofman turned to Rancher as the platform to manage its containers more effectively as they migrated to an Azure cloud. Today, with Rancher, their infrastructure is set up to scale, as the user numbers are expected to grow dramatically. With Rancher automating a host of basic processes, developers are free to innovate.

High availability is also a critical need for the company – because online shopping never sleeps. With a microservices-based environment built on Kubernetes and Rancher, developers can develop, test and deploy services in isolation and ensure reliable, fast releases of new services.

Today, with a container-based infrastructure, the company has reduced management hours and testing time by 80 percent and achieved 99.95 percent uptime.

Read our case study to hear how, with Rancher, Hofman and the AH.nl team have embraced containers as a way to focus on innovation and staying ahead of the competition.

Editor’s Note: Since the launch of Rancher Academy in 2020, a lot has happened. Rancher Academy has evolved into Academy classes, now available in the SUSE & Rancher Community. Our Up and Running: Rancher class aligns with the latest release of Rancher (Rancher 2.6). The class is available on demand. Other Rancher Academy Classes include Up and Running: K3s and Accelerate Dev Workflows.

Today we launched the Rancher Academy, our new free training portal. The first course is Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1, and in it you’ll learn exactly how to deploy Rancher and use it to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters. This professional certification program is designed to help Kubernetes practitioners demonstrate their knowledge and competence with Kubernetes and Rancher – and to advance in their careers.

Why is Rancher Labs doing this? We want all the members of our community to have the most relevant and up to date skills in Rancher – the most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform. We also want to give you the skills to be at the forefront of the cloud-native way of doing business, which is agile, open source oriented and maniacally focused on innovation.

Market Demand for Kubernetes Skills Far Exceeds Supply

We’re seeing massive demand in the industry for people with Kubernetes skills, and it’s continuing to rise as organizations adopt cloud-native strategies and embrace Kubernetes. There’s nowhere near enough supply right now. What I’m seeing in the industry is that organizations are trying to quickly get their teams up to speed on Kubernetes. You’ve got people with reliable non-cloud-native skill sets, or non-Kubernetes skill sets, who are suddenly being given these Kubernetes environments that they need to maintain.

Businesses and governments all over the world use Rancher to deploy and manage their Kubernetes clusters. People in those organizations are working with Rancher, but they might have learned it through the filter of their past knowledge and experience.

That’s where Rancher Academy comes in. Our objective is for an individual to go to an organization and say, “I have a certification from Rancher Labs,” and for organizations to know exactly what that means: that they were trained by Rancher, and that we’ve given our approval of their ability to execute according to our standards.

Is Rancher Academy Right for You?

Our first course, Up and Running: Rancher, is designed for people who want to install Rancher and use it to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters. You’ll need to have some basic Kubernetes knowledge, but you don’t need to know anything about Rancher.

We intentionally chose not to include Docker or Kubernetes fundamentals in our course because there are other training courses that cover that material. Until today there were no courses specifically for Rancher.

The course starts off talking about the Rancher architecture, installing RKE (one of our two certified Kubernetes distributions) and installing Rancher into it. Whether you are brand new to Rancher or have been using it for a while, you’ll find value in the course. For those experienced with Rancher, you’ll validate the skills you already have, and perhaps learn some slightly different ways of doing things that are the official “Rancher-sanctioned” way. And for those new to Rancher, you’ll walk away with the confidence that you are using Rancher the right way.

Rancher Academy: How It Works

The program is online and self-paced, with Level 1 designed to be completed over five weeks. The course includes four hours of video content, with 87 units of instruction, quizzes, 37 hands-on labs and a final assessment.

The labs are designed for you to do on your own. The idea here is that we’re building muscle memory: you learn about it, you see it demonstrated and then you do it yourself. As you progress through the course, you build and maintain an infrastructure, and by the end of the course, you’ll have a highly available Rancher deployment with at least one downstream cluster.

Now you might be saying, “Whoa, this sounds like a lot of work.” The beauty of the course is that it’s self-paced. If you follow the five-week model, you’ll need to spend about three to five hours a week. On the other hand, if you’re so excited that you want to just blaze through it in a week, you can do that.

Throughout the course, as you’re learning the material, you can validate what you’ve learned through the quizzes, and you can easily go back if you need to repeat something. Along the way you’ll be building an environment, testing out workloads, trying out persistent storage and encountering challenges that are unique to your infrastructure. You’ll be developing the skills to solve those challenges, and you can get help along the way from the community.

“With sustainability our primary focus, our technology strategy has to mirror our overall approach. With Rancher we’re driving real transformation to prime us for long-term growth.”
– Zach Dunn, Senior Director of Platform Operations and CSO, Optoro

Have you ever considered what happens to items you return to etailers? In retail, especially ecommerce, nearly 25 percent of all goods are returned or don’t sell. And in the US alone, the value of these goods is a staggering $500 billion – usually written off as losses by etailers. Beyond the economic impact, there are environmental consequences: many goods ending up in landfills.

Optoro aims to break this cycle. As the world’s leading returns optimization platform, Optoro has pioneered a reverse logistics model to solve this excess goods problem. Using machine learning and predictive analytics, they route returned and excess goods to their next best home, whether it’s an end consumer, charity or recycler – anywhere in the world. Optoro operates a consumer resale site,  www.blinq.com, and a wholesale site, www.BULQ.com. The company estimates that they have diverted 3.9 million pounds of waste from landfills, prevented 22.7 million pounds of carbon emissions, and donated 2.7 million items to charities.

Soon after joining the company, Senior Director of Platform Operations and CSO Zack Dunn decided to move the company from a cloud-based infrastructure to on premises. Optoro had a steady state in terms of costs; APIs and databases were never powered down and so costs would increase or decrease with cloud expansion and contraction. Transitioning into a data center, Dunn could level-set his costs – driving greater predictability into financial management.

After converting their estate of VMs into Docker containers, Dunn and his team started experimenting with Kubernetes. While a move Kubernetes made sense, they didn’t want to absorb additional costs – and could not find a business case for OpenShift, GKE or EKS. They wanted a platform that allowed their developers to consolidate role-based access control and other backend processes and directly manage their clusters through an intuitive UI. Rancher checked all the boxes.

Following a successful proof of concept, the team started to migrate its services into containers and into Rancher. Currently it runs 12 of its 42 services in production, with plans to migrate the entire infrastructure.

Watch our video case study and hear directly from Dunn about Optoro’s journey from the cloud to the data center and the benefits of adopting Kubernetes and Rancher.

As a leading, open-source multi-cluster orchestration platform, Rancher lets operations teams deploy, manage and secure enterprise Kubernetes. Rancher also gives users a set of container network interface (CNI) options to choose from, including open source Project Calico. Calico provides native Layer 3 routing capability for Kubernetes pods, which simplifies the networking architecture, increases networking performance and provides a rich network policy model makes it easy to lock down communication so the only traffic that flows is the traffic you want to flow.

A common challenge in deploying Kubernetes is gaining the necessary visibility into the cluster environment to effectively monitor and troubleshoot networking and security issues. Visibility and troubleshooting is one of the top three Kubernetes use cases that we see at Tigera. It’s especially critical in production deployments because downtime is expensive and distributed applications are extremely hard to troubleshoot. If you’re with the platform team, you’re under pressure to meet SLAs. If you’re on the DevOps team, you have production workloads you need to launch. For both teams, the common goal is to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

Why Troubleshooting Kubernetes is Challenging

Since Kubernetes workloads are extremely dynamic, connectivity issues are difficult to resolve. Conventional network monitoring tools were designed for static environments. They don’t understand Kubernetes context and are not effective when applied to Kubernetes. Without Kubernetes-specific diagnostic tools, troubleshooting for platform teams is an exercise in frustration. For example, when a pod-to-pod connection is denied, it’s nearly impossible to identify which network security policy denied the traffic. You can manually log in to nodes and review system logs, but this is neither practical nor scalable.

You’ll need a way to quickly pinpoint the source of any connectivity or security issue. Or better yet, gain insight to avoid issues in the first place. As Kubernetes deployments scale up, the limitations around visibility, monitoring and logging can result in undiagnosed system failures that cause service interruptions and impact customer satisfaction and your business.

Flow Logs and Flow Visualization

For Rancher users who are running production environments, Calico Enterprise network flow logs provide a strong foundation for troubleshooting Kubernetes networking and security issues. For example, flow logs can be used to run queries to analyze all traffic from a given namespace or workload label. But to effectively troubleshoot your Kubernetes environment, you’ll need flow logs with Kubernetes-specific data like pod, label and namespace, and which policies accepted or denied the connection.

Calico Enterprise Flow Visualizer

A large proportion of Rancher users are DevOps teams. While ITOps has traditionally managed network and security policy, we see DevOps teams looking for solutions that enable self-sufficiency and accelerate the CI/CD pipeline. For Rancher users who are running production environments, Calico Enterprise includes a Flow Visualizer, a powerful tool that simplifies connectivity troubleshooting. It’s a more intuitive way to interact with and drill down into network flows. DevOps can use this tool for troubleshooting and policy creation, while ITOps can establish a policy hierarchy using RBAC to implement guardrails so DevOps teams don’t override any enterprisewide policies.

Firewalls Can Create a Visibility Void for Security Teams

Kubernetes workloads make heavy use of the network and generate a lot of east/west traffic. If you are deploying a conventional firewall within your Kubernetes architecture, you will lose all visibility into this traffic and the ability to troubleshoot. Firewalls don’t have the context required to understand Kubernetes traffic (namespace, pod, labels, container id, etc.). This makes it impossible to troubleshoot networking issues, perform forensic analysis or report on security controls for compliance.

To get the visibility they need, Rancher users can deploy Calico Enterprise to translate zone-based firewall rules into Kubernetes network policies that segment the cluster into zones and apply the correct firewall rules. Your existing firewalls and firewall managers can then be used to define zones and create rules in Kubernetes the same way all other rules have been created. Traffic crossing zones can be sent to the Security team’s security information and event management (SIEM), providing them with the same visibility for troubleshooting purposes that they would have received using their conventional firewall.

Other Kubernetes Troubleshooting Considerations

For Platform, Networking, DevOps and Security teams using the Rancher platform, Tigera provides additional visibility and monitoring tools that facilitate faster troubleshooting:

• The ability to add thresholds and alarms to all of your monitored data. For example, a spike in denied traffic triggers an alarm to your DevOps team or Security Operations Center (SOC) for further investigation.
• Filters that enable you to drill down by namespace, pod and view status (such as allowed or denied traffic)
• The ability to store logs in an EFK (Elasticsearch, Fluentd and Kibana) stack for future accessibility

Whether you are in the early stages of your Kubernetes journey and simply want to understand the “why” of unexpected cluster behavior, or you are in large-scale production with revenue-generating workloads, having the right tools to effectively troubleshoot will help you avoid downtime and service disruption. During the upcoming Master Class, we’ll share troubleshooting tips and demonstrate some of the tools covered in this blog, including flow logs and Flow Visualizer.

Join our free Master Class: Enabling More Effective Kubernetes Troubleshooting on Rancher on May 7 at 1pm PT.