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Introduction to Rancher and Kubernetes

Hey guys, in this section we're going to focus on the history of Rancher and Kubernetes. We'll cover the products and solutions that came before them and how they've evolved into what they are today. By the end of this section, you should have a good understanding of the origins of Rancher and Kubernetes and their core concepts. This knowledge is essential for you to understand why Rancher and Kubernetes are what they are. Let's dive into these topics one by one.-

In this section, we'll discuss:

  • The background of Rancher Labs?
  • Rancher's earlier products?
  • Rancher's main philosophy?
  • The origins of Kubernetes?
  • The problem that Kubernetes is trying to solve?
  • How Kubernetes compares to Docker Swarm and OpenShift?

The background of Rancher Labs

  • Rancher Labs was founded in 2014 with the goal of creating a container management platform that was open source and community-driven.
  • Rancher is the flagship product of Rancher Labs and is used to manage and orchestrate containerized workloads on-premises and in the cloud.
  • Rancher is vendor-neutral, meaning that it can work with different types of hardware and cloud services, making it a flexible and powerful solution for managing containerized applications.
  • In addition to Rancher, Rancher Labs has also released other open source products, such as RancherOS, RKE, K3s, and Longhorn. These products are designed to work seamlessly with Rancher and provide additional functionality for managing containerized workloads.
  • Rancher Labs is committed to the principles of open source software and has made all of its products freely available for anyone to use and modify. This allows the community to contribute to the development of Rancher and its related products, making them even better over time.

Rancher's earlier products

Rancher Labs is a company that provides open source container orchestration software, with a focus on community-driven development. Its main product, Rancher, is a management platform for containerized workloads on-premises and in the cloud. Rancher is vendor-neutral and can deploy workloads on various types of hardware. Rancher Labs also has other open source products, including RancherOS, RKE, K3s, and Longhorn.

  • Rancher Labs was founded in 2014 in Cupertino, California, by Sheng Liang, Shannon Williams, Darren Shepherd, and Will Chanas. Rancher Labs released its first product, Rancher v1.0, in March 2016.
  • Initially, Rancher only supported Docker Swarm and Rancher Cattle clusters for managing containerized workloads. Docker Swarm was an early cluster orchestration tool that introduced concepts such as defining an application as a group of containers that can be created and destroyed at any time, and using a virtual network to make containers accessible on all nodes in a cluster.
  • Rancher Labs also developed its own Docker cluster software, called Cattle, which aimed to address the limitations of Docker Swarm in areas such as networking, load balancing, and storage.
    • Networking: Cattle improved upon the networking capabilities of Docker Swarm by allowing users to specify their own subnets for each environment, rather than being limited to a class C subnet by default. This added flexibility made it easier for users to manage their networks and avoid conflicts with existing infrastructure.
    • Load balancing: Cattle's use of HAProxy allowed for much more advanced load balancing capabilities, such as session persistence, SSL termination, and connection management. This made it easier for users to deploy complex applications that required these features.
    • Storage: Cattle's support for additional storage providers like AWS and VMware gave users more options for storing their data and allowed them to leverage the benefits of these platforms. Rancher also provided the ability to specify custom storage drivers, which gave users even more control over their storage infrastructure.
  • Cattle introduced features such as IPsec tunnel management, HAProxy load balancing, and NFS storage options, and later added support for additional storage providers and external authentication providers like Active Directory and LDAP.
  • Rancher Labs has released several open source products, including Rancher, RancherOS, RKE, K3s, and Longhorn. Rancher Labs' flagship product is Rancher, which is a management and orchestration platform for containerized workloads both on-premises and in the cloud such as (AWS, GCP, Azure, Digital Ocean, Civo, Linode...). Rancher is vendor-neutral and can deploy workloads using physical hardware in data centers,

Rancher's main philosophy

  • Rancher's core philosophy is centered on the idea of open source and community-driven development, and the company has continued to expand and improve its product offerings over time.

The origins of Kubernetes

  • Kubernetes, also abbreviated as k8s, is a cluster manager that was developed at Google from an internal project called Borg.
  • The name Kubernetes originates from Greek and means helmsman or pilot.
  • Borg was used to run Google's internal applications, which are made up of tens of thousands of microservices hosted on clusters worldwide.
  • Borg provided three main benefits:
    • Abstraction of resource and failure management, allowing application designers to focus on application development.
    • High reliability and availability by design, achieved through the use of stateless applications that can be horizontally scaled across clusters.
    • Effective workload with minimal overhead on compute resources.

The problem that Kubernetes is trying to solve

  • Kubernetes is an open-source platform for managing containerized applications at scale.
  • The problem Kubernetes solves is the difficulty of managing and scaling containerized applications in a distributed environment.
  • Containers, such as Docker, make it easy to package an application and its dependencies together, but managing and scaling multiple containers across multiple machines can be challenging.

Comparing Kubernetes to Docker Swarm and OpenShift

  • Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that can be used to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It is considered to be the most feature-rich and mature of the three options and is widely used in production environments.

  • Docker Swarm is a native clustering and orchestration solution for Docker containers. It is simpler to set up and use than Kubernetes, but it also has fewer features. It is often used in development and testing environments, or in cases where a simpler orchestration solution is needed.

Kubernetes vs OpenShift

Features and Architecture:

  • Both Kubernetes and OpenShift follow the same core design practices
  • They differ in terms of execution

Networking:

  • Kubernetes lacks built-in networking solution, relies on third-party plug-ins (canal, flannel, Weave)
  • OpenShift provides built-in network solution called Open vSwitch, a VXLAN-based software-defined network stack

Application Deployment:

  • Kubernetes approach is to be as flexible as possible, allowing any Linux distribution and supporting Windows images
  • OpenShift standardizes the stack on RedHat products (RHEL) and puts limits on container images

Security:

  • Kubernetes had built-in tool Pod Security Policies (PSPs) for pod-level security, but it was deprecated in v1.21 due to limitations
  • PSPs are being replaced by third-party tool OPA Gatekeeper
  • OpenShift has a stricter security mindset and has the option to be secure as default

In conclusion

  • Kubernetes is a powerful and feature-rich container orchestration system that is widely used in production environments.

  • Docker Swarm is simpler and more lightweight, making it a good choice for development and testing environments.

  • OpenShift is built on top of Kubernetes and adds enterprise features, making it a good choice for production environments.