Rancher Labs, a provider of container management software, today announced the general availability of Rancher 2.0, an open source Kubernetes management platform that allows organizations to deliver Kubernetes-as-a-Service to their employees and centrally manage all of their Kubernetes clusters, regardless of how the cluster was deployed, or where it is running. Rancher 2.0 is the first platform to manage hosted Kubernetes services from Google (GKE), Amazon (EKS) and Azure (AKS), enforcing consistent security policies, and providing an intuitive user experience across any cluster. With Rancher 2.0, organizations can accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes and deploy applications consistently on any infrastructure.

“Rancher 2.0 is a major step forward in open source container management,” said Steve Hendrick, Research Director at EMA. “For those enterprises looking for a complete container management solution for hybrid environments, Rancher 2.0 is an ideal choice.”

A complete platform for accelerating Kubernetes adoption in the enterprise

Rancher 2.0 is built for organizations that are embracing containers, microservices and Kubernetes to accelerate development, improve application reliability and reduce infrastructure costs. The platform consists of three core components:

  • Rancher Kubernetes Engine, a Kubernetes distribution that can be deployed on any infrastructure, whether on premise or in the cloud.
  • Unified Cluster Management, a centralized management engine that allows IT departments to configure and enforce consistent security and administrative policies on any Kubernetes cluster, whether it is already running, deployed by Rancher, or provisioned as a service from a cloud provider.
  • Application Workload Management, an intuitive user interface for Kubernetes, combined with an application catalog, real-time monitoring and alerting, log aggregation, and integrated CI/CD pipelines.

“Working with Rancher, we’ve been able to migrate a massive implementation of VMs to containers, saving money and improving the service we deliver,” said Leon Katsnelson, director & CTO, Strategic Partnerships IBM Digital Business Group. “Rancher 2.0 is a major step forward, and will simplify our adoption of Kubernetes over the next year.”

Key benefits of Rancher 2.0 include:

  • Rapid deployment of Kubernetes clusters: Rancher automates the process of creating Kubernetes clusters, and allows organizations to scale both the control plane and infrastructure easily from the API, CLI or web UI. Once clusters have been provisioned, administration can be delegated to admins and users throughout the organization, allowing teams to deploy, scale and manage clusters on any infrastructure.
  • Management of cloud-hosted clusters: Every large cloud provider now offers Kubernetes as a managed service. These services are the easiest way to set-up Kubernetes, and require little ongoing maintenance because the cloud providers are responsible for operating and upgrading Kubernetes. Rancher 2.0 is the first platform to provide consistent, centralized management of these clusters, allowing organizations to apply standard security policies, centralize access control and gain visibility into every cluster deployed in their organization.
  • Central IT visibility and control: As Kubernetes has rapidly gained adoption, clusters have begun to sprawl, and organizations are struggling to maintain consistent controls across a wide variety of different versions and configurations of Kubernetes. Rancher 2.0 provides IT administrators with centralized authentication, access control, monitoring, alerting and policy management for every Kubernetes cluster deployed on premise or in the cloud.
  • Accelerated Kubernetes adoption among developers and DevOps teams: Rancher 2.0 includes an intuitive UI that makes it easy for users to deploy services on Kubernetes and get visibility into everything running on a cluster. Users are presented with common configuration options directly from the UI for defining scheduling rules, health checks, ingress controllers, secrets, storage and other key configuration choices. Advanced users can work directly with the full kubectl command line, as well as Rancher’s APIs and CLI.

In addition, the new platform manages application catalogs and allows users to access community contributed Helm charts, as well as Rancher-certified templates. Organizations can even import and manage private application catalogs and share them with specified users.

Rancher 2.0 is open source software and freely available to anyone. For organizations looking for enterprise-grade support, Rancher Labs offers world-class support for the entire container stack, including the container engine, Kubernetes distribution and Rancher platform, giving organizations the confidence to deploy Kubernetes and Rancher in production, at any scale. Tightly defined SLAs and around the clock support options ensure users get the help needed from Rancher Labs experts.

With over more than 5,000 organizations using Rancher and 160 customers, including Dish Network, NTT Communications, USDA, NHS, IBM, Interoute and Cetera, and $30 million in funding, Rancher has quickly become the de facto choice for enterprises looking to run containers and Kubernetes in production. In the past year, Rancher Labs has expanded rapidly, with more than 80 employees and offices in San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Sydney, Amsterdam, New York and Shanghai.

“When we started development on Rancher 2.0, we set out to build a single platform that would manage Kubernetes everywhere, whether we deployed it or not,” said Sheng Liang, CEO and co-founder of Rancher Labs. “We are more confident than ever that containers and Kubernetes will enable a new era of application portability, and strongly believe Rancher 2.0 will accelerate the adoption of Kubernetes in many organizations.”

For additional information on Rancher 2.0, and to learn more about Rancher Labs and the company’s suite of open source products, please visit www.rancher.com.