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This blog will examine how Rancher improves the life of DevOps teams already invested in AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) but looking to run workloads on-prem, with other cloud providers or, increasingly, at the edge. By reading this blog you will also discover how Rancher helps you escape the undeniable attractions of a vendor monoculture while lowering costs and mitigating risk.

Why is AWS EKS So Popular?

AWS is the world’s largest cloud provider, with over a million customers and $7.3 billion in 2018 operating income. Our friends at StackRox recently showed that AWS still commands 78 percent market share despite the aggressive growth of rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

However, if you choose only AWS services for all your Kubernetes needs, you’re effectively locking yourself into a single vendor ecosystem. For example, by choosing Elastic Load Balancing for load distribution, AWS App Mesh for service mesh or AWS Fargate for serverless compute with EKS, your future is certain but not yours to control. It’s little wonder that many Amazon EKS customers look to Rancher to help them deliver a truly multi-cloud strategy for Kubernetes.

The Benefits of a Truly Multi-Cloud Strategy for Kubernetes

As discussed previously, multi-cloud has become the “new normal” of enterprise IT. But what does “multi-cloud” mean to you? Does it mean supporting the same vendor-specific Kubernetes distribution on multiple clouds? Wouldn’t that just swap out one vendor monoculture for another? Or does it mean choosing an open source management control plane that treats any CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution as a first-class citizen, enabling true application portability across multiple providers with zero lock-in?

Don’t get me wrong – there are use cases where a decision-maker will see placing all their Kubernetes business with a single vendor as the path of least resistance. However, the desire for short-term convenience shouldn’t blind you to the inherent risks of locking yourself into a long-term relationship with just one provider. Given how far the Kubernetes ecosystem has come in the past six months, are you sure that you want to put down all your chips on red?

As with any investment, the prudent money should always go on the choice that gives you the most value without losing control. Given this, we enthusiastically encourage you to continue using EKS – it’s a great platform with a vast ecosystem. But remember to keep your options open – particularly if you’re thinking about deploying Kubernetes clusters as close as possible to where they’re delivering the most customer value – at the edge.

Kubernetes on AWS: Using Rancher to Manage Containers on EKS

If you’re going to manage Kubernetes clusters on multiple substrates – whether on AKS/GKE, on-prem or at the edge – Rancher enhances your container orchestration with EKS. With Rancher’s integrated workload management capabilities, you can allow users to centrally configure policies across their clusters and ensure consistent access. These capabilities include:

1) Role-based access control and centralized user authentication
Rancher enforces consistent role-based access control (RBAC) policies on EKS and any other Kubernetes environment by integrating with Active Directory, LDAP or SAML-based authentication. Centralized RBAC reduces the administrative overhead of maintaining user or group profiles across multiple platforms. RBAC also makes it easier for admins to meet compliance requirements and delegate administration of any Kubernetes cluster or namespace.

RBAC Controls in Rancher

2) One intuitive user interface for comprehensive control
DevOps teams can deploy and troubleshoot workloads consistently across any provider using Rancher’s intuitive web UI. If you’ve got team members new to Kubernetes, they can quickly learn to launch applications and wire them together at production level in EKS and elsewhere with Rancher. Your team members don’t need to know everything about a specific Kubernetes distribution or infrastructure provider to be productive.

Multi-cluster management with Rancher

3) Enhanced cluster security
Rancher admins and their security teams can centrally define how users should interact with Kubernetes and how containerized workloads should operate across all their infrastructures, including EKS. Once defined, these policies can be instantly assigned any Kubernetes cluster.

Adding customer pod security policies

4) Global application catalog & multi-cluster apps
Rancher provides access to a global catalog of applications that work across multiple Kubernetes clusters, whatever their location. For enterprises running in a multi-cloud Kubernetes environment, Rancher reduces the load on operations teams while increasing productivity and reliability.

Selecting multi-cluster apps from Rancher’s catalog

5) Streamlined day-2 operations for multi-cloud infrastructure
Using Rancher to provision your Kubernetes clusters in a multi-cloud environment means your day-2 operations are centralized in a single pane of glass. Benefits to centralizing your operations include one-touch deployment of service mesh (upstream Istio), logging (Fluentd), observability (Prometheus and Grafana) and highly available persistent storage (Longhorn).

What’s more, if you ever decide to stop using Rancher, we provide a clean uninstall process for imported EKS clusters so that you can manage them independently. You’ll never know Rancher was there.

Next Steps

See how Rancher can help you run containers in AWS and enhance your multi-cloud Kubernetes strategy. Download the free whitepaper, A Guide to Kubernetes with Rancher.

Introduction

There’s no one-size-fits-all migration path for moving legacy Windows applications to the cloud. These applications typically reside on either physical servers, virtual machines or on premises. While the goal is generally to rearchitect or redesign an application to leverage cloud-native services, it’s not always the answer. Re-architecting an existing application to a microservice architecture or to cloud native presents several challenges in terms of cost, complexity and application dependencies.

While there are major benefits to modernizing your application, many organizations still have existing services running on Windows 2003 Servers. Microsoft’s support withdrawal for Windows 2003 presents several challenges. For one, it’s forcing decisions about what to do with said application — especially given that Windows 2008 end of life isn’t far off.

Organizations want to move to a modern architecture to gain increased flexibility, security and availability in their applications. This is where containers provide the flexibility to modernize the applications and move it to cloud-native services. In this article, we’ll focus on applications that can move to containers – typically .Net, web, SQL and other applications that don’t have a dependency to run only on Windows 2003. You can move these applications to containers without code changes, making them portable for the future. And you’ll get the benefit of running the containers on Kubernetes, which provides orchestration, availability, increased resiliency and density.

Note: not all applications or services can run in containers. There are still core dependencies for some applications which will need to be addressed, such as database and storage requirements. In addition, the business needs to decide on the ongoing life of the application.

Business Benefits of Moving to Kubernetes

There are some key business reasons for moving these applications to containers, including:

• Return on Investment
• Portability of older web-based services
• Increased application security
• Time for the business to re-evaluate existing applications

Now that Kubernetes supports Windows worker nodes, you can migrate legacy Windows applications to a modern architecture. Windows workers and Linux workers can co-exist within the same Kubernetes platform, allowing operations teams to use a common set of tools, practices and procedures.

Step 1: Analyse Your Move From Windows to Kubernetes

Migrating a legacy Windows application to Kubernetes requires a significant amount of analysis and planning. However, some key practices are emerging. These include:

• Break down the application to its original form to understand what components are running, how they are running and their dependencies
• Discover what services the application provides and what calls it makes in terms of data, network and interlacing
• Decouple the data layer from the application
• Determine and map service dependencies
• Test, test and test again

Step 2: Plan Your Move from Windows to Kubernetes

Migrating your Windows application to a containerized .Net-based platform is a multi-step process that requires some key decisions. The following high-level process provides some guidance on requirments to migrate legacy Windows systems to run on Kubernetes.

• Determine what operating system your container needs — either Server Core or Nano Server. The application’s dependencies will dictate this choice.
• Follow compatibility guidelines. Running Windows containers adds strict compatibility rules for the OS version of the host and the base image the container is running. They must run Windows 2019 because the container and the underlying host share a single kernel. Currently, (at the time of writing this article) only Server Process Isolation is supported. However, Hyper-V isolation is expected soon (timing unknown), which will assist in compatibility between the host and the container.
• Package your legacy application
• Build out your initial Docker-based container with the application package
• Deploy a new Docker container to a repository of your choice
• Leverage existing DevOps toolsets (CI/CD build and release pipelines)
• Deploy the new Windows Application to your Windows-supported Kubernetes environment
• Test, test and test again

Key Outcomes of Moving Windows Applications to Kubernetes

By moving from Windows to Kubernetes, your legacy applications will share the benefits of your existing container-based applications. In addition, your Windows applications will benefit from the Kubernetes platform itself. What’s more, they can use additional tools and systems within the Kubernetes ecosystem, including security, service mesh, monitoring/alerting, etc.

Together, these benefits put you in a good position to make key decisions about your applications and develop a business use case. For applications that can’t be migrated, you still need to decide what to do with them, given the lack of support for the underlying Operating System. Since no further patches or security remediations available, your organizations is exposed to vulnerabilities and exploits. So the time to act is now.

Key Takeaways for Migrating from Windows to Kubernetes

• Container-based solutions provide cost savings.
• Containers reduce dependencies and provide portability for applications.
• While Docker is the de facto standard for running Containers, Kubernetes is the de facto container orchestration engine.
• Kubernetes can host scalable, reliable and resilient Windows Containers–based applications alongside Linux-based applications.
• Organizations running a Kubernetes platform can integrate the legacy applications into their DevOps culture and toolsets.
• Leveraging native and ecosystem-based tools for Kubernetes increases security and adds extra layers of protection for legacy applications

More Kubernetes Resources

Want to learn more about strategy and planning a Kubernetes move? Get our white paper: How to Build an Enterprise Kubernetes Strategy.

Kubernetes has seen an incredible rise over the past few years as organizations leverage containers for complex applications, micro-services and even cloud-native applications. And with the rise of Kubernetes, DevOps has gained more traction. While they may seem very different — one is a tool and the other is a methodology — they work together to help organizations deliver fast. This article explains why Kubernetes is essential to your DevOps strategy.

Google designed Kubernetes and then released it as open source to help alleviate the problems in DevOps processes. The aim was to help with automation, deployment and agile methodologies for software integration and deployment. Kubernetes made it easier for developers to move from dev to production, making applications more portable and leverage orchestration. Developing in one platform and releasing quickly, through pipelines, to another platform showcased a level of portability that was previously difficult and cumbersome. This level of abstraction helped accelerate DevOps and application deployment.

What is DevOps?

DevOps brings typically siloed teams together – Development and IT Operations. DevOps promises to help teams work collectively and collaboratively to achieve business outcomes faster. Security is also an important part of the mix that should be included as part of the culture. With DevSecOps, three silos come together as “first-class citizens” working collaboratively to achieve the same outcome.

From a technology point of view, DevOps typically focuses on CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery or continuous deployment). Here is a quick explanation:

Continuous integration: developers make constant updates to source code within a shared repository, which is then scanned and checked by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.

Continuous deployment: once approved, code is released into production, resulting in many production deployments every day.

Continuous delivery: software is built and can be released at any time – but by a manual process

Quick Kubernetes Recap

As noted above, Google created Kubernetes and released a variation as open source to the general public. It is now one of the flagship products looked after by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Different deployments of Kubernetes are available, including those from managed providers (AWS, Azure and GCP), Rancher RKE and others that can be built from scratch (Kubernetes the Hard Way by Kelsey Hightower).

Kubernetes allows organizations to run applications within containers in a distributed manner. It also handles scaling, resiliency and availability. Additionally, Kubernetes provides:

• Load balancing
• Ability to provide access to storage (persistent and non-persistent)
• Service discovery
• Automated rollouts, upgrades and rollbacks
• Role-based access control (RBAC)
• Security controls for running applications within the platform
• Extensibility to leverage a large and growing ecosystem to support DevOps

The Kubernetes DevOps Connection

By now we can start to see a correlation between DevOps teams creating applications and running containers and needing an orchestration engine that keeps them running at scale. This is where Kubernetes and DevOps fit together. Kubernetes helps teams respond to customer demands without having to worry about the infrastructure layer – Kubernetes does this for them. The orchestration engine within Kubernetes takes over the once-manual tasks of deploying, scaling and building more resiliency into the applications; instead, it has the controls to manage this on the fly.

Kubernetes is essential for DevOps teams looking to automate, scale and build resiliency into their applications while minimizing the infrastructure burden. Letting Kubernetes manage an application’s scale and resiliency based on metrics, for example, allows developers to focus on new services instead of worrying whether the application can handle the additional requests during peak times. The following are key reasons why Kubernetes is essential to a DevOps team:

Deploy Everywhere. As noted previously, Kubernetes handles the ability to deploy an application anywhere without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. This abstraction layer is one of the biggest advantages to running containers. Wherever deployed, the container will run the same within Kubernetes.

Infrastructure and Configuration as Code. Everything within Kubernetes is “as-code,” ensuring that both the infrastructure layer and the application are all declarative, portable and stored in a source repository. By running “as-code,” the environment is automatically maintained and controlled.

Hybrid. Kubernetes can run anywhere – whether on-premises, in the cloud, on the edge. It’s your choice. So, you’re not locked in to either an on-premises deployment or a cloud-managed deployment. You can have it all.

Open Standards. Kubernetes follows open-source standards, which increases your flexibility to leverage an ever-growing ecosystem of innovative services, tools and products.

Deployments with No Downtime. Since applications and services get continuously deployed during the day, Kubernetes leverages different deployment strategies. This reduces the impact on existing users while giving developers the ability to test in production (phased approach or blue-green deployments). Kubernetes also has a rollback capability – should that be necessary.

Immutability. This is one of the key characteristics of Kubernetes. The oft-used analogy, “cattle, not pets,” means that containers can (and should) be able to be stopped, redeployed and restarted on the fly with minimal impact (naturally, there will be an impact on the service the container is operating).

Conclusion: Kubernetes + DevOps = A Good Match

As you can see, the relationship between the culture of DevOps and the container orchestration tool Kubernetes is a powerful one. Kubernetes provides the mechanisms and the ecosystem for organizations to deploy applications and services to customers quickly. It also means that teams don’t have to build resiliency, scale, etc. into the application – they can trust that Kubernetes services will take care of that for them. The next phase is to integrate the large ecosystem surrounding Kubernetes (see the CNCF ecosystem landscape), thus, building a platform that is highly secure, available and flexible to allow organizations to serve their customers faster, more reliably and at greater scale.

More Resources

Read the white paper: How to Build an Enterprise Kubernetes Strategy.

Having completed a series of twelve Lighthouse Roadshow events across Europe and North America over the past six months, I’ve had time to reflect on what I’ve learnt about the rapid growth of the Kubernetes ecosystem, the importance of community and my personal development.

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Lighthouse series before, Rancher Labs first ran this roadshow in 2018 with Google, GitLab and Aqua Security. The theme was ‘Building an Enterprise DevOps Strategy with Kubernetes’. After selling out six venues across North America, I felt that its success could be repeated in Europe. We tested this theory in May by running the first 2019 Lighthouse in Amsterdam with Microsoft, GitHub and Aqua Security. The event sold out in just two weeks, and we had to move to a larger venue downtown to accommodate a growing waiting list.

Bas Peters from GitHub at Lighthouse Amsterdam – 16th May 2019

After the summer vacation period, the European leg of the Lighthouse re-started in earnest with events in Munich and Paris on consecutive days. The Paris event turned out to be the largest of the roadshow. Held at Microsoft’s magnificent Paris HQ, we packed their main auditorium with almost 300 delegates. In the weeks that followed the Lighthouse team also visited Copenhagen, London, Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm and, finally, Dublin. Not to be outdone, Rancher’s US team organised a further three Lighthouse events with partners Amazon, GitLab, and Portworx during November.

Now home, sitting at my desk and reflecting on the lessons learnt, I’ve distilled them down to the following:

Focus on context not product pitches

Organizing the content for so many consecutive events with many different speakers was a significant challenge. We had a mix of sales guys, tech evangelists, consultants and field sales engineers presenting. Those speakers that received the best response (and exchanged the most business cards during the coffee breaks) always delivered insight into the context in which their products exist. I share this lesson because I want to encourage those running similar events in this space to understand the value of insight. This is particularly true if you work for a company that doesn’t charge anything for their technology. In a market where there are no barriers to adopting software, the only way you can genuinely differentiate is the quality of the story you tell and the expert insight that you deliver.

Alain Helaili from GitHub at Lighthouse Paris – 11th Oct 2019

Interest in Kubernetes is exploding

Of the almost 3000 IT professionals who registered for the roadshow globally, more than half are already using Kubernetes in production. So, what makes the excitement around Kubernetes different from previous hype-cycles? I would contend there are two principal differences:

1. Low barrier to entry – Kubernetes takes minutes to install on-prem or in the cloud. I regularly see enthusiastic sales and marketing people launching their first cluster in the public cloud. Compare that to something like OpenStack which, despite the existence of a variety of installers on the market, is hellish to get up and running. Unless you have access to skilled consultants from the beginning, the technical bar is set so high that only the most sophisticated teams can be successful.
2. Mature and proven – Kubernetes has, in one form or another, been around for over ten years orchestrating containers in the world’s largest IT infrastructures. Google introduced the Borg around 2004. Borg was a large-scale internal cluster management system, which ran many thousands of different applications, across many clusters, each with up to tens of thousands of machines. In 2014 the company released Kubernetes as an open-source version of Borg. Since then, hundreds of thousands of enterprises have deployed Kubernetes into production with all the public clouds now offering managed varieties of their own. Google rightly concluded that a rising tide would float all ships (and use more cloud compute!). Today Kubernetes is mature, proven and used everywhere. Sadly, you can’t say the same about OpenStack.

Yours truly opening proceedings at Lighthouse Munich – 10th Oct 2019

Enterprises are still asking the same questions

While the adoption of Kubernetes is undeniably the most significant phenomenon in IT operations since virtualization, those enterprises that are considering it are asking the same questions as before:
1. Who should be responsible for it?
2. How does it fit into our cloud strategy?
3. How do we tie it into our existing services?
4. How do we address security?
5. How do we encourage broader adoption?

In what is still a relatively nascent market, its challenging questions like these that need to be answered by Kubernetes advocates transparently and in person if they are to be taken seriously. The stakes are high for early adopters, and they need assurance that the advice you offer is real, tangible and trusted by others. That’s why we created the Lighthouse Roadshow.

Olivier Maes from Rancher Labs at Lighthouse Copenhagen – 31st Oct 2019

Community matters

Unless the ecosystem around new technology is open and well-governed, it will die. Companies or individuals that reject community members as freeloaders are consigning themselves to irrelevance. You can always find some people who are willing to jump through the hoops of licensing management or lock themselves into a single vendor. Still, most of today’s B2B tech consumers are looking to make their choices based on third-party validation. Community members may not pay for your software, but they contribute to your growth by endorsing your brand and sharing their own success stories.

The Lighthouse Roadshow is 100% community driven. We’re not interested in making a profit from ticket sales preferring instead to see how well our stories resonate with delegates. The more insight delivered, the more successful the event. The feedback from each of the Lighthouse venues has been hugely rewarding and the opportunities for growth have been incalculable. We couldn’t have achieved this if we just measured our success by tracking the conversion rate of delegate numbers to MQLs and close won opportunities.

Steve Giguere from Aqua Security at Lighthouse London – 8th Nov 2019

Surrounding yourself with talent makes you better

It’s widely known that one of the best ways to improve on a skill is to practice it with someone better than you. During the Lighthouse Roadshow I had the unique privilege of attending every European event and listening to every talk, sometimes multiple times. The skills and knowledge of the speakers and professionalism of the event professionals who helped us was simply amazing.

I’m particularly grateful to my fantastic colleagues at Rancher Labs – Lujan Fernandez, Abbie Lightowlers, Olivier Maes, Tolga Fatih Erdem, Jeroen Overmaat, Elimane Prud’ hom, Nick Somasundram, Simon Robinson, Chris Urwin, Sheldon Lo-A-Njoe, Jason Van Brackel, Kyle Rome and Peter Smails. I’ve also been fortunate to work alongside rockstars from partner companies like Steve Giguere, Grace Cheung and Jeff Thorne at Aqua Security; Bas Peters, Richard Erwin and Anne-Christa Strik at GitHub; and Bozena Crnomarkovic Verovic, Dennis Gassen, Shirin Mohammadi, Maxim Salnikov, Sherry List, Drazen Dodik, Tugce Coskun, Anna-Victoria Fear, Juarez Junior and many others from Microsoft; Alex Diaz and Patrick Brennan from Portworx; Carmen Puccio from Amazon; and Dan Gordon from GitLab. I can’t help but feel inspired by all these fantastic people.

By the time we finished in Dublin, I felt invigorated and filled with new ideas. Looking back, I know that listening and sharing with these brilliant folks has encouraged me to step up my own game.

More Resources

What to know more about how to build an enterprise Kubernetes Strategy? Download our eBook.

Container technology is transforming the face of business and application development. 70% of on-premises workloads today are running on the Windows Server operating system and enterprise customers are looking to modernize these workloads and make use of containers.

We have introduced support for Windows Containers in Windows Server 2016 and graduated support for Windows Server worker nodes in Kubernetes 1.14 clusters. With Windows Server 2019 we have expanded support in Kubernetes 1.16.

For our customers one of the preferred ways to increase the adoption of containers and Kubernetes is to work to make it easier for operators to deploy it and for developers to use it.

Towards that end Microsoft has invested in AKS and Windows Container support with this goal in mind while working with partners such as Rancher Labs who has built their organization on the principle of “Run Kubernetes Everywhere”.

With the release of Rancher 2.3, Rancher is the first to have graduated Windows support to GA and can now deploy Kubernetes clusters with Windows support from within the user experience.

Using Rancher 2.3 users can deploy Windows Kubernetes clusters in AKS, Azure Cloud, any other cloud computing provider or on-premises using the supported and proven network components in Windows Server as well as Kubernetes.

Rancher 2.3 will support Flannel as the CNI plugin and Overlay Networking with VxLAN to enable communication between Windows and Linux containers, services, and applications.

Learn more about Rancher 2.3 and its functionality.

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Rancher 2.3,
the latest version of our flagship product. Rancher, already the
industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes management platform, adds
major new features with v2.3, including:

• Industry’s first generally available support for Windows containers, bringing the benefits of Kubernetes to Windows Server applications.
• Introduction of cluster templates for secure, consistent deployment of clusters in large scale deployments
• Simplified installation and configuration of Istio service mesh

These new capabilities strengthen our Run Kubernetes Everywhere strategy
by enabling an even broader range of enterprises to leverage the
transformative power of Kubernetes.

Bringing the Benefits of Kubernetes to Windows Server Applications

Today, 70% of on-premises workloads are running on the Windows Server
operating system, and in March of this year, Windows Server Container
support was built into the release of Kubernetes v1.14

Not surprisingly, Windows containers have been one of the most desired technologies within the Kubernetes ecosystem in recent years. We are proud to be partnering with Microsoft on this launch and are excited to be the first Kubernetes management platform to deliver GA support for Windows Containers and Kubernetes with Windows worker nodes! To get Microsoft’s perspective on Rancher 2.3, check out this blog from Mike Kostersitz, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft.

By bringing all the benefits of Kubernetes to Windows, Rancher 2.3 eases
complexity and provides a fast and straightforward path for modernizing
legacy Windows-based applications, regardless of whether they will run
on-premises or in a multi-cloud environment. Alternatively, Rancher 2.3
can eliminate the need to go through the process of rewriting
applications by containerizing and transforming them into efficient,
secure and portable multi-cloud applications.

Secure, Consistent Deployment of Kubernetes Clusters with Cluster Templates

With most businesses managing multiple clusters at any one time,
security is a key priority for all organizations. Cluster templates help
organizations reduce risk by enabling them to enforce consistent cluster
configurations across their entire infrastructure. Specifically, with
cluster templates:

• Operators can create, save, and confidently reuse well-tested Kubernetes configurations across all their cluster deployments.
• Administrators can enable configuration enforcement, thereby eliminating configuration drift or improper misconfigurations which, left unchecked, can introduce security risks as more clusters are created.

Additionally, admins can scan existing Kubernetes clusters using industry tools like CIS and NIST to identify and report on unsecure cluster settings in order to facilitate a plan for remediation.

Tighter Integration with the Leading Service Mesh Solution

A big part of Rancher’s value is its rich ecosystem catalogue of
Kubernetes services, including service mesh. Istio, the leading service
mesh, eliminates the need for developers to write specific code to enable
key Kubernetes capabilities like fault tolerance, canary rollouts,
A/B testing, monitoring and metrics, tracing and observability, and
authentication and authorization.

Rancher 2.3 delivers simplified installation and configuration of
Istio including:

• Kiali dashboards for traffic and telemetry visualization
• Jaeger for tracing
• Prometheus and Grafana for observability

Rancher 2.3 also introduces support for Kubernetes v1.15.x and Docker
19.03. Getting started with Rancher v2.3 is easy. See our documentation for instructions on how to be up and running in a flash.

Our Momentum Continues

Rancher 2.3 is just the latest proof point of our momentum in 2019.
Other highlights include:

• 161 percent year-on-year revenue growth, community growth to more than 30,000 active users, oftware downloads have surpassed 100M.
• Rancher was named a leader in Forrester New Wave^TM , Enterprise Container Platform Software Suites
• Rancher is included in Five Gartner Hype Cycles in 2019
• Rancher was recognized by 451 Research as a Firestarter in Q3’19

And, maybe the best part of the story is that we have more exciting news coming very soon! Stay tuned to our blog to learn more.

We also look forward to seeing everyone at KubeCon 2019 in San Diego, California. Come to booth P19 to talk with us or get a personalized demo.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked by a sales rep the following question: “The customer has looked at Stackalytics and is wondering why Rancher doesn’t have as many code commits as the competition. What do I say?”

For those of you unfamiliar with Stackalytics, it provides an activity snapshot, a developer selfie if you will, of commits and lines of code changed in different open source projects. Although a very worthwhile service, some vendors like to use it as proof of their technical prowess and commitment to an open-source project’s ecosystem.

But does the number of code commits by a vendor tell the full story?

Certainly, some would argue that it does. For example, whilst working at Canonical, I regularly came across customers who’d ask us why we made relatively few commits to upstream OpenStack when compared to other vendors. This was despite the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution being used by just about everybody within the community. It seems that now, at Rancher, we’re being asked to justify our Kubernetes credentials by a similar measure despite the fact that our eponymous Kubernetes management platform has been downloaded over 100,000,000 times.

Perhaps those evaluating vendors should be asking different questions like:

• Is it possible that some vendors hire teams of engineers to focus solely on developing code for upstream Kubernetes?

• As a customer, will you get access to the engineering expertise needed to make those code commits?

• Does more upstream code commits mean that the vendor’s Kubernetes management platform is better than competitive products?

• Is the vendor with the most code commits more engaged with the Kubernetes community than everyone else?

At every tradeshow I’ve been to this year, community members have come to the booth to thank me for the Rancher platform and what Rancher Labs does for the Kubernetes eco-system. They don’t care about code commits, they care about the business value we deliver.

Rancher helps tens of thousands of teams be successful with Kubernetes. Without it they couldn’t easily realise advanced DevOp capabilities like continuous delivery, canary/blue/green deployments, service autoscaling, automated DNS & load balancing, SSL and certificate management, secret management… etc. It’s these capabilities (plus not being locked into a single vendor ecosystem) that deliver extraordinary value to end users, their employers and to the wider Kubernetes community. Best of all – they don’t have to pay for it!

It’s also worth remembering that contributing to a large open source community like Kubernetes isn’t a single-threaded experience. k3s was launched by Rancher in March 2019 to huge excitement. k3s is a Kubernetes distribution designed to run production workloads in remote, resource constrained locations like in IoT devices or the network edge. Although the project isn’t measured by Stackalytics’ code commit counter, k3s amply demonstrates Rancher’s technical leadership and commitment to helping enterprises deploy Kubernetes from their core infrastructure to the network edge.

Building an Enterprise Kubernetes Strategy

For more information on how Rancher can help you build an enterprise Kubernetes strategy, download our recent whitepaper.

The holy grail for any CMO looking for their next gig is to find the
perfect combination of addressable market, market timing, company, and
product. That’s why I am so excited to be joining the team at Rancher
Labs, the leader in container management software. Let’s look at all the
variables.

Market Opportunity & Timing

The market for containers is conservatively HUGE! What’s a
container? A container is a standard unit of software that packages up
code and all associated dependencies enabling an application to run
quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. For
example, development teams are using containers to package entire
applications and move them to the cloud without the need to make any
code changes. Another example, containers make it easier to build
workflows for modern applications that run between on-premises and cloud
environments.

While containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications, you
also need to manage the containers that run the applications. That’s
where Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes is an open source container
orchestration engine for automating deployment, scaling, and management
of containerized applications. Recent research indicates that
approximately 40% of enterprises are running Kubernetes in production
today, but in less than three years that number will increase to more
than 84%!

As infrastructure increasingly moves to multi-cloud (e.g. on-premises,
AWS, GCP, Azure) and enterprise applications become more complex,
development and IT operations teams need an effective way to manage
Kubernetes at scale.

Therein lies the opportunity!

Company and Product

If you don’t know already, Rancher Labs builds innovative, open source
software for enterprises leveraging containers to deliver
Kubernetes-as-a-Service. Rancher was founded by a group of cloud and
open source thought leaders who have already
made their mark at places like Cloud.com, Citrix, and GoDaddy. They
foresaw the need and created our flagship Rancher platform, which allows
users to easily manage all aspects of running Kubernetes in production,
on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices and
the network edge.

Unlike solutions from competitors like Red Hat and Pivotal, our solution
delivers the ideal balance of flexibility and control, including:

• Multi-Cluster Application Support: Kubernetes users can deploy and maintain their applications on multiple clusters from a single action, reducing the load on operations teams and increasing productivity and reliability for businesses running in hybrid-cloud, multi-cloud, or multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
• Support for Cloud Native Kubernetes Services: In addition to offering two certified Kubernetes distributions (RKE and k3s), Rancher provides complete flexibility by enabling enterprise customers to manage any Kubernetes distribution and any cloud-native Kubernetes service such as GKE, EKS, and AKS. For users, every Kubernetes cluster behaves the same way and has access to all of Rancher’s integrated workload management capabilities.
• No Vendor Lock-In: As free and open source software, Rancher costs much less to own and operate than PKS and OpenShift while providing a more capable product that doesn’t lock you into any single vendor’s ecosystem.

Addressable market? Check! Market timing? Check! Company? Check!
Product? Check!

It doesn’t get any better than that!

While I am privileged to join Rancher, I am merely one small cog in the
big wheel of their momentum. Check out what’s happened since the start
of 2019 alone:

• Customer Growth: We grew our customer base by 52% while YoY revenue grew 161%.
• Product Innovation: We introduced major enhancements to Rancher with the release of version 2.2 and also launched new open source projects:
  • Rio
  • Longhorn
  • k3s
  • k3OS
• Funding – we raised another $25M in Series C funding, bringing the total amount raised to $55M. That means we’ve got loads of cash to invest in continuing our rapid growth.

You can read all about our momentum here, or to learn more, jump to
www.rancher.com.

#RunKubernetesEverywhere!

This week Rancher Labs announced a record 161% year-on-year revenue growth, along with a 52% increase in the number of customers in the first half of 2019. Other highlights from H1’19 included:

• Closure of a $25M series C funding round
• Doubling of international headcount as we continue our expansion into 12 countries
• Software downloads surpassed 100 million making Rancher the industry’s most widely adopted Kubernetes software platform
• General availability of Rancher 2.2
• Continued investment in open source projects including Rio, Longhorn, k3s, and k3OS

You can find the complete release here.

We are grateful to our community of customers, partners, and users for the growth we achieved in the first half of 2019, and we will continue to gauge Rancher’s success in the larger context of enterprise adoption of Kubernetes. Rancher will continue to deliver value by enabling organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes across their entire infrastructure.

Kubernetes Everywhere

Recent research reports that approximately 40% of enterprises are running Kubernetes in production today, but in less than three years that number will increase to more than 80%. What will drive that growth? Kubernetes helps organizations significantly increase the agility and efficiency of their software development teams, while also helping IT teams boost productivity, reduce costs and risks, and it moves organizations closer to achieving their hybrid-cloud goals.

As container usage becomes more widespread across an organization, balancing the needs of developers who want autonomy and agility with the needs of IT teams who want consistency and control can prove challenging. Whether your organization builds large clusters of infrastructure and then offers development teams shared access to them, or leaves individual departments or DevOps teams to decide for themselves how and where to use Kubernetes, it is not uncommon for tension to develop between those wanting to run Kubernetes in exactly the way they need it and IT teams that want to maintain security and control over how Kubernetes is implemented.

Rancher’s Role in Enabling Everywhere

Only Rancher is purpose-built to address the requirements of both developer teams and IT operations teams, thereby enabling organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale.

Here’s how:

• Simplified Cluster Operations – In addition to offering two certified Kubernetes distros (RKE and k3s), Rancher enables enterprise customers to utilize any Kubernetes distribution or hosted Kubernetes service. Customers can use cloud-native Kubernetes services such as GKE, EKS, and AKS. By supporting any Kubernetes distribution or service, Rancher enables customers to implement Kubernetes in the most cost-effective way and operate Kubernetes clusters in the simplest way possible, while still leveraging the consistency of Kubernetes across all types of infrastructure.

• Security & Policy Management – Rancher provides IT organizations with centralized management and control over all Kubernetes clusters, regardless of how they are implemented or operated. By managing security policies for all of your Kubernetes clusters in one place, Rancher minimizes human error and wasted energy. Rancher’s unified web UI replicates all functionality available within Kubernetes and includes tooling for Day Two operations. Full control via CLI and API is also available. Rancher is simple to install in any environment, integrates with user authentication platforms, and quickly starts to address many of the workflow challenges experienced by developer and operations teams who work with Kubernetes. A single Rancher installation can manage hundreds of Kubernetes clusters running on-premise or in any cloud. This provides technical teams with a seamless development experience and helps business leaders adopt a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy.

• Shared Tools & Services – Rancher provides a rich set of shared tools and services on top of any Kubernetes cluster. Rancher ships with CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, logging, and all the tools needed to make your Kubernetes clusters immediately useful. Less time spent worrying about your infrastructure means more resources to invest in the accelerated delivery of innovative cloud-native applications.

So, while we are proud of our success in the first half of 2019, we are even more excited about the future! As Kubernetes continues to proliferate and grow in complexity, organizations will increasingly rely upon solutions like Rancher that enable them to run Kubernetes EVERYWHERE!

To learn more about Rancher, check us out at www.rancher.com.

For an introduction to Kubernetes, join an upcoming online training session.