Happy New Year from Rancher Labs!

As
we start a new year, I’d like to thank the Rancher community for a great
2016. 2016 was an awesome year for Rancher Labs, and we’ve been
fortunate to have a deeply engaged community of open source users and
developers, customers, and partners. In March, [we shipped our 1.0 GA
release],
and since then Rancher has established itself as a leading product in
the container ecosystem. 2016 was especially rewarding because of the
tremendous amount of support we received from our users and customers.
So many of you have posted
[insightful articles],
[blog
posts],
forum questions and answers, and GitHub issues, and seeing how users
talk about
us
[on
Twitter]
and other social media platforms drives us to work harder. We are
continually inspired by the great stories people have about how they use
Rancher, like those by like those by Dispatch,
[LateRooms.com],
and Alertacall.
We are grateful to users [who are willing to share their experiences
using Rancher with the
world],
and to our friends at Align Technology who are so enthusiastic about our
product that they organized the first [Rancher user group in the
US].
In 2016, our product development was guided by a few key ideas, and our
community of users will continue to see us expand upon these in 2017:

A rich application catalog. Rancher brought one-click deployments
for complex multi-container apps to the market in 2015. In 2016, the
Rancher community contributed over 100 catalog entries in categories
such as monitoring, big data, CI, analytics, and many more. A rich
catalog experience continues to be a great attraction of Rancher.

The ability to run any orchestrator. There is perhaps no other area
in the container ecosystem as vibrant and innovative as container
orchestration and scheduling, and Rancher remains the only product in
the industry that supports and distributes multiple container
orchestration and scheduling frameworks. By building a simple,
streamlined experience and providing supported distributions of
Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm, Rancher dramatically simplifies
what an organization has to do to deploy and manage containers in
production.

Powerful, modular infrastructure services. In 2016, we improved
popular infrastructure services like multi-host networking and load
balancing within Rancher. [Rancher
1.2]
achieved an important milestone in introducing the full support for CNI
container networking and FlexVolume storage plugin frameworks.

Ability to run on any cloud. Rancher’s vision has always been to
make computing infrastructure a commodity, and to make clouds completely
interchangeable. Containers have already made applications packages
portable, but by integrating a powerful set of infrastructure services
in networking, storage, and security, Rancher makes it possible for
applications to become truly cloud-agnostic.

Despite being relatively young, there is no doubt that technologies like
Docker and Kubernetes are achieving mainstream adoption, and we are
excited by the role Rancher has in helping organizations adopt these
technologies. We will continue to work closely with our open source user
community and our growing customer base in 2017, but you can expect us
to be guided by the following principles as we do so:

Rancher will continue to support and integrate mainstream container
technologies for our users. With Rancher, organizations are never at
risk of technology lock-in.

Rancher will simplify the task of running containers in production.
We continue to innovate in our user experience to bring container
adoption to the mass market.

Rancher will work to build a comprehensive infrastructure platform
for containers. We believe there are many areas to innovate in
building out an infrastructure platform for containers, so organizations
will no longer need to worry about where they get their computing
resources. We are working on a number of projects in this area. Keep an
eye out for our announcements in 2017.

In such a fast-moving market, I can’t imagine all the new technologies
and market opportunities the container ecosystem will create in 2017.
And I can’t wait to find out.