The Power of Innovation

CEO and Co-Founder Sheng Liang has a saying about how we approach open source at Rancher Labs: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” When we set out to build something, we don’t know if it will turn into a successful product, spark another product idea or be a good idea that doesn’t get traction. The joy is in the journey.

Take K3s, our lightweight Kubernetes distribution. We didn’t start out developing K3s – it grew organically out of a project called Rio. K3s was inspired by the insight and passion of our developers who saw a need for a Kubernetes distribution for IoT and the edge. These forward thinkers were right. According to Gartner, 75 percent of enterprise data will be created and processed outside of data centers and cloud deployments by 2025.

CRN Recognizes Rancher Labs for Innovation

K3s has influenced other innovative products in the open source community, such as k3sup and k3d. We’re proud that K3s has gained a loyal following and that it continues win accolades. CRN recently included K3s in its roundup of The 10 Coolest Open-Source Software Tools of 2020 (So Far) due to its small binary (under 40 MB) that reduces the dependencies and steps needed to install, run and auto-update a production Kubernetes cluster. CRN recognized K3s and other tools on the list, such as Helm and Envoy, for leading the industry toward greater adoption of agile development and DevOps methods, AI, cloud-native architecture and advanced security.

No doubt the buzz around K3s influenced CRN to include Rancher Labs in another list: the 2020 Emerging Vendors. Honoring “rising technology suppliers that exhibit great promise in shaping the future success of the channel with their dedication to innovation,” CRN’s list provides a resource for solution providers in search of the latest technologies.

At Rancher Labs, partnerships are crucial to our business. We rely on more than 200 solution providers worldwide who deliver customer offerings around our products, including Rancher, our enterprise platform for Kubernetes management. These partners are also innovators, inspired to help their customers do things better.

Being an innovator means knowing you can’t go it alone –- and our ecosystem partners are critical to that. Rancher includes a global catalog of applications that our users can easily integrate into their environments to maximize productivity and reliability.

At the end of the day, we want to make our users’ lives better by making Kubernetes clusters easier to deploy and manage so that they can focus on the business at hand. For most organizations, that’s what innovation is: finding better ways to solve problems.

The idea of letting a thousand flowers bloom means being able to evolve our technologies and take the best parts of the things we’ve developed. Sometimes it means admitting that a technology you love isn’t going to make it. It’s having insight into what technology will best solve customer problems and driving adoption of that technology. For Rancher Labs, embracing open source means embracing the best of innovation –- no matter where it comes from. That’s why we’re 100 percent open source with no vendor lock-in.

As we look to the future of Rancher Labs, one thing is sure. Innovation will continue to be a driving force in everything we do. We’ll continue to plant the seeds of innovation and watch them grow.