Introduction

Rancher 2 is a platform that allows you to manage and administer Kubernetes clusters, as well as the resources running in each of them (Deployments, Pods, Services, Persistence, etc...).

It also offers advanced functionalities that Kubernetes does not offer natively, such as: monitoring and metrics, DevOps tools, advanced user management, Service Mesh (Istio) etc...

Why Rancher?

Simplicity of use

Nobody doubts that Kubernetes is the orchestrator par excellence, however, nowadays, the management of the resources that are deployed (Deployments, Jobs, Pods, Services, Secrets, etc...) is quite complicated and cumbersome from the native dashboard of Kubernetes, and the cli (kubectl) despite being very powerful for a system administrator is not an ideal tool for everyone.

Rancher offers a web console on Kubernetes that allows you to easily manage the resources deployed, for example, when deploying a new Deployment, you can configure everything from environment variables to more complex concepts such as upgrade policy, health-checks, resource limits, network aspects, etc...

Open

Open

RKE

Rancher offers its own certified Kubernetes engine for deployment, making the process of installing and configuring a k8s cluster as simple as possible. It is also CNCF-certified (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) which ensures compatibility with Kubernetes.

Open Source

One of the main advantages of Rancher over other platforms such as Openshift is the fact that it is 100% Open Source and free. Only the support is paid, in case you want to be contracted..

Advanced users management

One of the unique concepts in Rancher 2 is Projects. A project allows you to group one or more Kubernetes namespaces together and thus manage their visibility to different users..

Advanced monitoring and metrics

A very important feature of Rancher is the monitoring it offers through Prometheus metrics and Grafana dashboards, as well as an operations console more focused on system administrators.

Once the monitoring is activated, we can access it in an integrated way in the cluster view.

An overview of the most common variables (CPU, Memory, Disk, Disk, Network, etc...) is also provided in the different Pods displayed.

In addition, the Grafana link will lead directly to a more complete and detailed view of the metrics in the default dashboard.

In the "Cluster explorer" view, you can see a much more detailed and technical view of the cluster aspects as well as the workloads and Charts available in the Rancher marketplace.

DevOps tools

Optionally offers integrated CI/CD tools and service mesh (Istio).