Run Kubernetes Everywhere

Kubernetes has become the container orchestration standard. Most cloud and virtualization vendors now offer it as standard infrastructure. Rancher users have the choice of creating Kubernetes clusters with Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) or cloud Kubernetes services, such as GKE, AKS, and EKS. Rancher users can also import and manage their existing Kubernetes clusters created using any Kubernetes distribution or installer.

Meet IT requirements

Rancher supports centralized authentication, access control, and monitoring for all Kubernetes clusters under its control. For example, you can:

  • Use your Active Directory credentials to access Kubernetes clusters hosted by cloud vendors, such as GKE.
  • Setup and enforce access control and security policies across all users, groups, projects, clusters, and clouds.
  • View the health and capacity of your Kubernetes clusters from a single-pane-of-glass.

Empower DevOps Teams

The following figure illustrates the role Rancher plays in IT and DevOps organizations. Each team deploys their applications on the public or private clouds they choose. IT administrators gain visibility and enforce policies across all users, clusters, and clouds.

Features of the Rancher API Server

  • User management: The Rancher API server manages user identities that correspond to external authentication providers like Active Directory or GitHub, in addition to local users.
  • Authorization: The Rancher API server manages and security policies.
  • Provisioning Kubernetes clusters: The Rancher API server can on existing nodes, or perform Kubernetes upgrades.
  • Catalog management: Rancher provides the ability to use a that make it easy to repeatedly deploy applications.
  • Pipelines: Setting up a pipeline can help developers deliver new software as quickly and efficiently as possible. Within Rancher, you can configure pipelines for each of your Rancher projects.
  • Istio: Our is designed so that a Rancher operator, such as an administrator or cluster owner, can deliver Istio to developers. Then developers can use Istio to enforce security policies, troubleshoot problems, or manage traffic for green/blue deployments, canary deployments, or A/B testing.
  • Tracking nodes: The Rancher API server tracks identities of all the nodes in all clusters.
  • Setting up infrastructure: When configured to use a cloud provider, Rancher can dynamically provision and persistent storage in the cloud.
  • Logging: Rancher can integrate with a variety of popular logging services and tools that exist outside of your Kubernetes clusters.
  • Monitoring: Using Rancher, you can monitor the state and processes of your cluster nodes, Kubernetes components, and software deployments through integration with Prometheus, a leading open-source monitoring solution.
  • Alerting: To keep your clusters and applications healthy and driving your organizational productivity forward, you need to stay informed of events occurring in your clusters and projects, both planned and unplanned.

Editing Downstream Clusters with Rancher

The options and settings available for an existing cluster change based on the method that you used to provision it. For example, only clusters provisioned by RKE have Cluster Options available for editing.

After a cluster is created with Rancher, a cluster administrator can manage cluster membership, enable pod security policies, and manage node pools, among

* Cluster configuration options can’t be edited for imported clusters, except for K3s clusters.