How Rancher Helps Put Kubernetes into Production
On the newest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Rancher Labs Principal Software Engineer Alena Prokharchyk and Kubernetes user Brian Scott, currently a systems engineering manager at Disney, sat down with TNS founder Alex Williams at Kubecon 2016 to discuss the use of Kubernetes in production environments, and how Rancher could help such deployments.
How Rancher Labs is Seeing Kubernetes Put to Work in Production
RancherOS is a Linux distribution that natively supports and manages the Kubernetes container orchestration engine, as well as the Mesos and Swarm orchestrators. Rancher also provides Cattle, which is its homegrown infrastructure orchestration engine.
Kubernetes and Rancher “extracts a lot of the issues around provisioning nodes and load balancing for us. A lot of the secret sauce you have to write around other tools are kind of provided for us with Kubernetes. With Rancher, you can use any orchestration platform you want, and keep everyone happy. It’s a single pane of glass. You can get a feel for any type of orchestration that may fit that certain type of style of application,” said Scott.
Prokharchyk highlighted some of the additional features those working with Rancher in a multi-platform Kubernetes deployment can expect, including the ability to laying down the user’s overlay network, deploying the Kubernetes system stack, replacing ill or dead nodes, setting up an internal DNS for service discovery, and monitoring cluster health.
“Some of the challenges where we’ve been able to use Rancher, is to cut away all of the hard setup of Kubernetes. Now, it’s more like a push button setup,” said Scott, adding that despite this, Kubernetes still has a few particular areas of growth to address. These included storage, role management, and access control.
As Rancher Labs has continued to grow, looking to the future involves making the most of Kubernetes. “We want to explore all the tools that are there for Kubernetes cluster deployment. We want to learn from their experience, and we want to follow the Kubernetes community. See what features they’re adding, what should be changed in Kubernetes system clusters and management, mostly concentrating on the Kubernetes architecture to make the user experience easier,” said Prokharchyk.
As the conversation drew to a close, Scott offered a key take away vital to any developer hoping to make the most of Kubernetes in production.
“I think that in this day and age, everything’s changing so quickly. You have to adapt your applications to be able to pivot quickly,” Scott said.
