Rancher Labs,
the leading provider of container management software, announced
support for multi-cluster applications within Rancher, its open source
Kubernetes management platform. Rancher is the first platform to support
multi-cluster applications, and its users can now benefit from enhanced
reliability, security, and availability in multi-cluster and edge
computing environments.
"Rancher
has made deployment and management of Kubernetes a breeze, and over the
years we have added several new capabilities like RBAC, Projects and
out-of-the-box monitoring to make it even simpler," said Will Chan,
co-founder and vice president of engineering at Rancher Labs. "As the
number of users and clusters grow within an organization, for example in
edge computing scenarios, the deployment, management and upgrade of
applications and services that run across these clusters becomes
impossible to manage. With Rancher's support for multi-cluster apps,
we're thrilled to provide our customers with the exact tools needed to
alleviate the complexity and meet enterprise requirements."
Deploy, manage and upgrade applications simultaneously in multiple clusters
Applications
with high availability requirements must be deployed to multiple
clusters to ensure reliability. Historically, this has been done by
pulling nodes from other availability zones into the same cluster.
However, if the cluster failed, the application would still become
unavailable. Rancher's support for multi-cluster applications is a
significant step forward, solving this problem by allowing users to
select the application and the target clusters, providing cluster
specific data. Rancher then initiates deployment to those clusters.
"Our
AI solution, B-Yond INFINITY, runs on Kubernetes in telco environments
and must support multi-cluster deployments for availability reasons,"
said Rikard Kjellberg, chief product officer at B-Yond. "This is
beneficial for lifecycle management and in the edge deployments that we
see emerging in 5G edge cloud. With Rancher 2.2, we can now fully
automate the process and integrate with our lifecycle management
process, reducing time and risk while remaining compliant with
telco-grade requirements."
Multi-cluster
Kubernetes application support extends the robust feature set of Helm,
the Kubernetes package manager. Users simply select the application from
the Rancher Application Catalog, add target clusters, provide
information about each cluster, and deploy. Multi-cluster applications
use Kubernetes controllers running in the Rancher management plane to
fetch Helm charts and deploy the application to each target cluster. The
use of Helm charts allows Rancher to leverage features like upgrades,
rollbacks, and versioning of the applications.
Product Availability
Multi-cluster
application features are available in the 2.2.0-alpha4 and later
releases, which can be downloaded from Docker Hub, and will be generally
available in Rancher 2.2 later this year.