Three Reasons Why Hosted Rancher Makes Your Life Easier

Today’s generation of makers, artists and creatives have reinforced the idea that great things can happen when you roll up your sleeves and try to learn something new and exciting. Kubernetes was like this only a couple of years ago: the mere act of installing the thing was a rewarding challenge. Kelsey Hightower’s Kubernetes the Hard Way became the Maker’s handbook for this artisan craft.

Fast forward to today and installing Kubernetes is no longer a noteworthy event. Its orchestration has become a commodity, and rightly so, as many engineers, software companies and the like swarmed to address this need by building robust tooling. Today’s Maker has far more interesting problems to solve up the stack, and so they expect Kubernetes to be able to summon a cluster on demand whenever they need it. For this reason and others, we created the same solution for Rancher, the multi-cluster Kubernetes management system. If I can create Kubernetes in one click in any cloud provider, why not my Rancher control plane? Enter Hosted Rancher.

Hosted Rancher is a fully managed, cloud-based instance of Rancher server. You don’t need to maintain a separate Kubernetes cluster, install the Rancher application or deal with upgrades. You retain all the control and ownership of your downstream Kubernetes clusters just like the on-prem Rancher experience today. When you combine Hosted Rancher with any of the popular cloud-managed Kubernetes offerings such as GKE, EKS or AKS, you now have an almost zero-touch Kubernetes infrastructure. Hosted Rancher is ideal for organizations that are looking to expedite their time to value by focusing their time on application adoption and empowering developers to use these new tools. After all, if you don’t have any applications using Kubernetes, it won’t matter how well your platform is maintained.

If you haven’t considered Hosted Rancher yet, here are three reasons why it might benefit you and your organization:

Increased Business Continuity

Operating Rancher isn’t rocket science, but it does require some ongoing expertise to safely maintain, back up and especially upgrade without causing downtime. Our core engineering team lives and breathes this stuff (they built Rancher, after all), so why not leverage their talent as a failsafe partnership with your staff?

Reduced Costs

TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is a bit of a buzzword, but it becomes a reality at the end of the fiscal year when you start looking at actual spend to operate something. When you factor in the cost of cloud or on-premise infrastructure and staff expense to operate these servers and manage the Rancher application, it’s quite likely much more expensive than our Hosted offering.

Increased Adoption

This benefit might be the most subtle, but I guarantee it is the most meaningful. Contrary to popular belief, the mission of Rancher Labs is not just to help people operate Rancher. Our mission is to help people operate and therefore realize the benefits of Kubernetes in their software development lifecycle.

This is the “interesting” part of the problem space for every company out there: “How do I harness the value of Kubernetes for my applications?” The sooner we can get past the table stakes concerns of implementing and operating Kubernetes and Rancher, the sooner we can focus on this most paramount issue of Kubernetes adoption. Hosted Rancher simply removes one hurdle from the racetrack. With support from Rancher’s Customer Success team focusing on user adoption, your teams are able to accelerate their Kubernetes journey quickly without compromising on performance and resource inefficiency.

Next Steps

I hope I’ve provided some insight that will help your journey in the Kubernetes and cloud-native world. To learn more about Hosted Rancher, check out our technical guide or contact the Rancher team. Until next time!