Continental Innovates with Rancher and Kubernetes
Rancher is a container management platform built for organizations that deploy containers in production. Rancher makes it easy to run Kubernetes everywhere, meet IT requirements, and empower DevOps teams.
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.
Rancher supports centralized authentication, access control, and monitoring for all Kubernetes clusters under its control. For example, you can:
Rancher provides an intuitive user interface for DevOps engineers to manage their application workload. The user does not need to have in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes concepts to start using Rancher. Rancher catalog contains a set of useful DevOps tools. Rancher is certified with a wide selection of cloud native ecosystem products, including, for example, security tools, monitoring systems, container registries, and storage and networking drivers.
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.
The Rancher API server is built on top of an embedded Kubernetes API server and an etcd database. It implements the following functionalities:
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 other options.
The following table summarizes the options and settings available for each cluster type:
* Cluster configuration options can’t be edited for imported clusters, except for K3s clusters.