Overcoming Kubernetes Complexity and Improving Collaboration

SUSE guest blog authored by:

Karthik Krishnaswamy, Head of Product Marketing at ngrok

DevOps practices and Kubernetes have become the backbone of modern software development and deployment. However, effectively managing Kubernetes and creating development environments that mirror live environments can be a challenge. This is where ngrok and Rancher Prime come into play by addressing these issues head-on. In this post, we will discuss how ngrok and Rancher Prime empower users, understand some Kubernetes-related challenges, and explore practical use cases.

Kubernetes, despite its power and flexibility, poses several challenges like managing multiple environments, maintaining security, providing real-time collaboration, and handling its own complexity. ngrok and Rancher Prime are built to mitigate these challenges, so let’s take a closer look at each of them.

ngrok‘s unified ingress platform simplifies the process of load balancing, securing, and monitoring traffic flows to your services across every stage of the development lifecycle – from dev/test to production environments. The ngrok ingress controller leverages the ngrok platform to provide secure internet access to your Kubernetes services by delegating network ingress and a variety of system level functions including performance, security, and high availability  to ngrok’s global point of presence network.

This unique architecture offers significant benefits over other controllers:

• Effortless Kubernetes Ingress: Set your ngrok account’s authentication keys and you’re good to go. No need for operators to hassle with configuring networking intricacies such as ELBs, IPs, network interfaces, or VPC routing.
• Environment Independence: Operates exactly the same way on EKS, GKE, k3s on your laptop or on your Raspberry Pi, and RKE2 in your private datacenter.
• Security and Resiliency: Since the controller directs authentication and policy to ngrok’s global edge, threats and undesired traffic never touch your original network.
• Acceleration: Your application traffic gets a boost as ngrok operates a global network covering all regions. Client traffic is directed to closest point of presence.

The ngrok Ingress Controller offers a secure, efficient, and convenient way of managing network ingress in your Kubernetes environments, including RKE2 and K3s clusters, removing  burden on operators and enhancing application performance.

Rancher is the leading open-source multi-cluster orchestration platform by SUSE that offers comprehensive management of Kubernetes. It simplifies the operation of Kubernetes at scale, making it an essential tool for teams working with container orchestration. SUSE customers can ensure their workloads and cluster operations with certified support and value-adding services available with a Rancher Prime subscription.

1. Simplifying Kubernetes Management – Rancher provides an intuitive interface to manage Kubernetes, reducing its inherent complexity and making it accessible for DevOps teams, even with multi-cluster environments.
2. Multi-Cloud Strategy – Rancher supports a multi-cloud strategy by providing a unified platform to manage Kubernetes workloads across different cloud providers. This ensures consistency across different infrastructures.

The RKE2 and K3s CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions maintained by SUSE further strengthen its value proposition. RKE2 is built to be secure by default and is compliant with the Kubernetes Cluster hardening guide from the start. It’s an excellent choice for teams looking for a Kubernetes solution that prioritizes security out of the box. K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution designed for edge and resource-constrained environments, makes it easier to manage Kubernetes in such conditions. It’s a perfect fit for IoT, Edge, and Small Form Factor (SFF) devices. K3s provides an incredibly compact and easy way to spin up a fully compliant Kubernetes cluster.

Better Together

Here are several ways users can leverage ngrok and Rancher to mitigate Kubernetes challenges:

1. Multi-Environment Synchronization – ngrok reduces the time to get your Kubernetes environments online with robust security and policy, aiding in multi-environment synchronization.
2. Security – Security is a key concern in Kubernetes. ngrok’s global network handles authentication to ensure that unwanted traffic and attacks never reach your Kubernetes environment. Meanwhile, Rancher manages the security of Kubernetes clusters offering features such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
3. Real-Time Collaboration and Debugging – By reducing development time to get services online securely with ngrok, teams can collaborate and debug in real-time on a shared Kubernetes environment, improving productivity.

Kubernetes Complexity – ngrok reduces the burden of network and security configuration while Rancher mitigates the inherent complexity of Kubernetes by providing an intuitive, unified platform to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across different environments – cloud, on-premises, and at the edge. SUSE and ngrok have partnered to enable Rancher users to easily deploy the ngrok Ingress Controller via the built-in Apps catalog in Rancher, further simplifying the process of exposing services to the public internet. You can read more about it in ngrok’s integration guide.

The combination of ngrok and Rancher, along with RKE2 and K3s, brings a comprehensive toolset to the table. Together, they meet the evolving needs of DevOps teams, making Kubernetes deployment more efficient, more manageable, more resilient, and more secure, irrespective of the scale and diversity of the environment. This collaboration ensures a more streamlined and secure way for developers to access and manage their Kubernetes clusters, enabling them to focus more on building and deploying applications rather than the complexities of network configurations and security. By enhancing the ease of collaboration and providing solutions that fit various use cases, from cloud migrations to the management of multi-cluster operations, they play a crucial role in how companies approach their coding and deployment challenges today.

Ready to try out this powerful combination? Sign up for Rancher Prime and ngrok today. Or, for demo of how these technologies can empower your dev and ops teams, reach out to hello@ngrok.com.

Meet us onsite at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in early November!

Author: Karthik Krishnaswamy, Head of Product Marketing at ngrok

Karthik Krishnaswamy is the Head of Product Marketing at ngrok. He is an experienced product marketer with a proven track record as an advocate for cutting-edge solutions built for developers and IT teams. Prior to ngrok, Karthik held similar positions at Fluke Networks, F5, and Nimble Storage, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.