When discussing cloud-native technologies and modern application development, it is common practice to assume Rancher and Kubernetes are both competing in the same market. However, while both products share similarities, Rancher and Kubernetes are in fact a cloud-native partnership.
Picture it this way: Kubernetes is the powerful open-source engine that drives your containerized applications, while Rancher is the sophisticated control panel and dashboard that streamlines the management of the engine. This blog post will explain this relationship while detailing the critical concepts, the role of the tools, as well as the integration that creates the seamless and powerful platform for the sophisticated multi-cluster architectures of today.
Understanding Containers and Containerization: The Foundation
Prior to discussing Rancher and Kubernetes, it is critical to discuss the building blocks of this ecosystem: containers and containerization.
Previously, applications used to be deployed on physical servers, or more recently, on virtual machines (VMs). A VM is a resource-intensive machine that works as a separate and fully virtualized computer on a single physical machine equipped with its own operating system (OS). This is a heavy and resource-intensive approach. Containerization takes a different approach. It packages all libraries, dependencies, and configuration files of an application into a lightweight package called a container, which is more portable and efficient.
Containers only require the host machine’s OS kernel, unlike VMs. This makes them much more portable and streamable. This containerized approach implements the write once, run everywhere philosophy. This approach treats environments as equal, allowing seamless operations in any environment. This is a vital advancement towards cloud modern architectures.
Single containers can easily be built and run with the use of Docker, but single containers, though easily manageable, become an operational nightmare when multiplied. This is where container orchestration platforms become necessary.
What Is Kubernetes? The Core of Container Orchestration
K8s, or Kubernetes, is an abbreviation of an open-source system that streamlines the deployment, scaling, and containerization of applications. Originally made by Google, it is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, or CNCF for short. The key to Kubernetes meaning is offering a declarative strategy to work with a system. You define the target state you want, say 3 replicas of an application, and Kubernetes will do whatever it takes to provision and sustain it.
A Kubernetes cluster, which is a logical collection of virtual or physical machines(nodes) that work together, is the foundation of Kubernetes. The cluster is divided into a control plane (the brain) and one or more worker nodes (the muscle) that run your application containers. The Kubernetes definition is more than just a scheduler; it’s a most advanced implementation of distributed self healing system with an extensive list of capabilities.
- Automated Rollouts and Rollbacks: New application versions, as well as older versions, can easily be deployed when needed without any downtimes. The system is self healing and will try to mitigate any damages.
- Self-Healing: Kubernetes restarts or replaces containers and nodes that have failed ensuring that your applications stay accessible and your services uninterrupted.
- Service Discovery and Load Balancing: This feature ensures that participants and clients do not have difficulty finding each other as it offers automatic mechanisms of discovering and helps with traffic routing as well.
- Horizontal Scaling: Scaling your applications is straightforward and can be done manually or automatically based on resource usage or custom-defined metrics.
Kubernetes is powerful, but its complexity is a barrier that prevents many people from accessing it. One needs to possess in-depth technical expertise to set up a cluster, manage its lifecycle, and maintain its security. This is where a partnership with Rancher is immensely helpful. The initial setup of Kubernetes is challenging enough, and that difficulty is compounded when trying to manage dozens of clusters in different environments. This creates operational difficulties that Rancher is designed to address.
Read More: What is kubernetes ?
What Is Rancher? The Kubernetes Management Platform
This takes us to the definition of Rancher. It is an open source software Rancher that acts as a one stop solution to managing all your Kubernetes clusters windows. The most important aspect to note is that Rancher is not a substitute for Kubernetes, though he is an additional layer that increases the efficiency of its use and management. The relationship between Rancher and Kubernetes is one of an orchestrator with a manager.
Consider an enterprise that has multiple Kubernetes clusters existing across a cloud provider AWS and also with Azure and Google Cloud, and on-premises data centers. It is a nightmare for an administrator to manage all of these clusters one ay a command line tool at a time. Rancher solves this problem with an intuitive dashboard which offers a single pane of glass for all your clusters.
As a Rancher user, you will note the following critical functionalities that enhance and provide value to the tool
- Centralized Cluster Management: Whether using a managed Kubernetes service or self-hosted clusters, Rancher allows you provision, upgrade and manage clusters from a single interface.
- User-friendly Interface: Enhancements done on Rancher’s web-based UI have made it possible to overlook the complexities involved in the command line part of Kubernetes. This is beneficial both for new teams as it enables them to adopt Kubernetes quickly and for experienced teams as it helps them in task automation.
- Improved Security and Compliance: With Rancher, the security and authentication for users is handled on a centralized basis for all the clusters. Rancher also has advanced RBAC and works with corporate ID systems making it easy to implement uniform security policies across the organization.
- Managing Applications: With Rancher, there is a managed catalog of applications which are called helm charts. This enables users to implement complex applications like monitoring stacks and databases with a single click.
Rancher also has a certified, light weighted and easy to use Kubernetes distribution called Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). RKE is known for easy and fast deployment and the next version, RKE2, presents a security-hardened add-on. Other than this, the blog would also discuss rancheros, the light weighted linux distro which is also part of the rancher ecosystem.
Rancher adds support to a number of the most popular open source tools for monitoring, logging, and CI/CD thus boosting the functionality of the platform for DevOps teams. This also includes container support, like Docker and Kubernetes.
The key takeaway from the Rancher and Kubernetes discussion is that both tools can be used simultaneously. It is not a matter of one tool being chosen over the other. Instead, the question is how one can leverage the best of both worlds.
Advantages of Kubernetes
Automation and Orchestration
Kubernetes has robust automation and self-healing for deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications. It takes care of the intricate details of container orchestration like scheduling containers on appropriate nodes, managing network connectivity, and keeping the right number of app replicas running. Applications remain robust and containers that fail are automatically restarted or replaced. This automation self-healing along with the container orchestration makes applications highly available and resilient. Daily operational tasks are offloaded significantly with day-to-day automation, and infrastructure work is streamlined, adding bandwidth for teams to focus on designing new features.
Scalability and Portability
Horizontally scaling applications are seamless on Kubernetes. It can scale up or down automatically based on resource use, traffic, or even custom metrics, ensuring workloads are efficiently handled. This is especially useful for modern applications with fluctuating traffic. Also, hosting environments are not restricted to a single cloud provider. Kubernetes as a platform is open sourced and can run the workloads consistently across on-premises data centers, private and public clouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. This eliminates vendor lock and adds flexibility, aiding cloud native architectures.
Service Discovery and Load Balancing
As part of the features available in Kubernetes, it offers service discovery and load balancing for applications. In case you have deployed a service, Kubernetes will provide you a unique DNS name along with an IP address. This helps the various components of your application to locate and interact with one another without the need for hardcoded IP addresses. As an additional benefit, Kubernetes helps to distribute network traffic across all the instances of a service. This guarantees that no container gets overloaded, while access to the system for users remains stable and optimal. This feature is essential for constructing sophisticated applications that are microservices-based.
Advantages of Rancher
Integrated Management of Multiple Clusters in One Location
One of the main advantages of Rancher is that it is capable of offering a single, integrated view of all your Kubernetes clusters, irrespective of where they are hosted. This solves a major problem for many organizations that have clusters in multiple locations, for example, in-house and with multiple cloud service providers. Rancher performs the entire lifecycle of a cluster from creation to maintenance, in an automated fashion. This includes but is not limited to, automation of upgrades, security policy management, and monitoring. This feature of rancher software, centralized management plane, brings multi-cluster simplicity to operation where multiple clusters are located in different edge computing environments.
Streamlined User Experience and Security
The web dashboard of Rancher makes it easier for beginners to Kubernetes to get started, thus lowering the barrier to entry. It still remains to be very useful to developers and operations teams as it removes the burden of dealing with the Kubernetes command line interface. In addition, Rancher also simplifies and strengthens security and governance with its centralized, comprehensive features. Security and user access policies such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) can be set once, and Rancher will enforce them uniformly across all clusters. This makes security and compliance easier, which is useful for larger, regulated environments.
All-Inclusive Tools and Ecosystem
In addition to the management of the cluster, Rancher offers a comprehensive set of integrated tools, as well as a rich application catalog. The cluster also features built-in monitoring, logging, and continuous delivery that is needed for day 2 operations. Moreover, the Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) also provides an easy to deploy Kubernetes distribution which makes cluster set up and management easier. Along with the most popular open source projects, Rancher offers a comprehensive platform for building, deploying, and managing modern applications, enhancing the value of the Kubernetes infrastructure while simplifying the entire DevOps workflow.
Rancher and Kubernetes Working Together
Many organizations have successfully scaled their cloud-native architectures using Rancher and Kubernetes together. In the next sections, I will detail how this combination addresses practical challenges, particularly in complex and high-demand scenarios.
1. Handling Disparate Cluster Configurations
With large global enterprises, it is almost unheard of to have a single Kubernetes cluster. Multiple clusters, spanning separate development, staging and production, as well as geographically distributed clusters for high availability and for various business units, are the norm. The disparate nature of the clusters is a burden on the operational resources available for manual management.
This is where Rancher shines. With Kubernetes Linux clusters being one of the Rancher dashboard options, an admin can create a new cluster on Amazon EKS, an on-prem RKE cluster, and a GKE running cluster. With that, there are three clusters that are controlled from a single dashboard system. Consistent security and monitoring policies can be applied making it easier to manage the clusters, and that is consistent to the operational efficiency Rancher provides.
2. Internet of Things and Edge Computing
Edge computing focuses on increasingly deploying applications to the source of the data, whether it is on the production line, within retail, or through remote sensors. It often involves the configuration and maintenance of thousands of small clusters.
This is a scenario where Rancher’s capabilities truly shine. RKE2, Rancher’s lightweight Kubernetes distribution, focuses on these kinds of use cases. Rancher allows the central deployment and management of these edge clusters, which is especially convenient considering the limited network connectivity most of these locations have. With Rancher, these dispersed clusters can be monitored and updated from a central location, which would be nearly impossible to achieve with pure Kubernetes.
3. AI and Machine Learning Workloads
AI and machine learning applications tend to be extremely data-driven, and require computing resources like GPUs. Additionally, they demand different management throughout the lifecycle of a project and have distinct phases for data ingestion, model training, and model inference.
Kubernetes serves as an excellent environment for executing workloads, as it offers resource management and scaling. Still, there are challenges in overseeing clusters and resources for different AI and ML teams. With Rancher, there is a single pane of glass for provisioning specialized clusters, managing user access, enforcing resource quotas, and controlling resource access. This ensures that data scientists and engineers can give their full attention to model development, while IT operations can focus on maintaining a secure and efficient infrastructure layer.
4. Improving Governance and Security
Security is vital in an enterprise environment. When it comes to Kubernetes Troubleshooting, enforcement of access controls, network policies, and container security vulnerabilities are often tangled in intricate multi-layered problems. With Rancher, you have a single pane of management security for all clusters, which simplifies security enforcement.
Security policies that Rancher provides can be customized, so that controls can be set at a cluster level, and silos set at pod level. Rancher groups can be set at cluster, project and namespace level, so that scoped permissions can be enforced. This also covers user login through a corporate directory as well as network policies controlling inter-service communication. Rancher’s UI is user-friendly, and provides a means to manage and visualize policies instead of editing individual cluster YAML files which is laborious and cumbersome.
5. Troubleshooting and Continuing Operations
Every tool and system will have their shortcomings. As with most systems, Kubernetes has its pros and cons as it has strong monitoring and logging features but they can be cumbersome to utilize. Kubernetes troubleshooting most often consists of looking at logs and events of multiple pods and nodes, which is very tedious.
Rancher offers a better alternative for carrying out these day-2 tasks because of its user friendly pivot features. Its dashboard provides a birds eye view of your clusters and workloads to assess their health. Moreover, it has integrations with monitoring systems like Prometheus and logging systems like Grafana which gives a single source for metrics, logs and alerts. With this single pane view, problems can be detected and solved with much less time and effort because of the enhanced visibility and centralized control.
The Bottom Line: What is Containerization and the Path Forward
As much as the journey of what are containers to a fully functioning and production scale environment is not very straightforward. Kubernetes provided the possibilities of container orchestration but Rancher delivers container orchestration because it caters to a broader audience.
Understanding the fundamentals of Kubernetes can be useful for a new team, but with Rancher, their adoption and productivity can be achieved much quicker. For a large enterprise, Rancher serves as a strategic asset by providing consistency, security, and management simplicity for the entire fleet of Kubernetes clusters. The support communities for Kubernetes and Rancher are both vigorous and resourceful, which is expected of the leading open-source projects.
Ultimately, the decision is not Rancher or Kubernetes. Instead, the brilliance is in the combination of the two: a best-in-class container orchestrator and a best-in-class management platform synergistically allowing organizations to confidently build, deploy, and manage their applications—anywhere from edge to cloud. This partnership showcases the impact of the open-source community and its initiatives on the evolution of cloud-native frameworks. Continuous advancements from both projects guarantee that businesses will always have the necessary resources to succeed in the ever-changing technological environment.
