The latest release of Rancher is now available. Rancher 2.5 introduces a new installation experience, GitOps at scale for edge clusters, full life cycle management of EKS cluster, and a new security hardened Kubernetes distribution for government customers.
“Exploding on-premise, public cloud and edge Kubernetes use cases are creating massive container sprawl,” said Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs. “With Rancher 2.5, we continue to deliver on our computing everywhere strategy by providing customers a simple and consistent way to deploy and manage containerized applications using any certified Kubernetes distribution, across any infrastructure, regardless of whether they are managing one cluster or one million.”
Rancher 2.5 can be installed on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster. Previously, there was a need for setting up a separate Kubernetes cluster in order to install Rancher. This new installation process will be useful for customers who already have access to an existing cloud-managed Kubernetes service. Other benefits of this streamlined process include better cluster management, a new cluster dashboard, and enhanced monitoring and logging.
To enable GitOps at scale, Rancher Labs is integrating the Fleet open-source project. Fleet’s key capabilities include the ability to leverage a Git repository to store and manage resource configurations, application packages that can be associated with an individual or group of clusters, and accelerated agile transformation.
Rancher 2.5 also offers full life cycle management for Amazon EKS clusters, which will give users access to EKS abilities like node groups and rolling upgrades. This release enhances the EKS user experience with capabilities like advanced observability, CIS benchmarking, push-button Istio service mesh, integrated OPA Gatekeeper, and simplified autoscaling.
For public sector customers, Rancher 2.5 introduces RKE Government, which is a FIPS-enabled and security-hardened version of the platform.
