Illumina Innovates with Rancher and Kubernetes
When your application is user-facing, ensuring continuous availability and minimal downtime is a challenge. Hence, monitoring health of the application is essential to avoid any outages. This article explains how to monitor the health of your applications on Kubernetes clusters in Rancher 2.0.
Rancher 1.6 is a widely used container orchestration platform that runs and manages Docker and Kubernetes in production. This article is a continuation in a series on migrating from Rancher 1.6 to Rancher 2.0
Rancher 2.0 is coming, and it’s amazing. In the Beginning... When Rancher released 1.0 in early 2016, the container landscape looked completely different. Kubernetes wasn’t the powerhouse that it is today. Swarm and Mesos satisfied specific use cases, and the bulk of the community still used Docker and Docker Compose with tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. It was still BYOLB (bring your own load balancer), and volume management was another manual nightmare.
One of the great things about microservices is that they allow engineering to decouple software development from application lifecycle. Every microservice: can be written in its own language, be it Go, Java, or Python can be contained and isolated form others can be scaled horizontally across additional nodes and instances is owned by a single team, rather than being a shared responsibility among many teams communicates with other microservices through an API a message bus must support a common service level agreement to be consumed by other microservices, and conversely, to consume other microservices These are all very cool features, and most of them help to decouple various software dependencies from each other.
Prometheus is a modern and popular monitoring alerting system, built at SoundCloud and eventually open sourced in 2012 – it handles multi-dimensional time series data really well, and friends at InfinityWorks have already developed a Rancher template to deploy Prometheus at click of a button. In hybrid cloud environments, it is likely that one might be using multiple orchestration engines such as Kubernetes and Mesos, in which case it is helpful to have the stack or application portable across environments.
*Note: Since publishing this post, we’ve created a guide comparing Kubernetes with Docker Swarm. You can read the details in the blog post here..* Over the last six months, Rancher has grown very quickly, and now includes support for multiple orchestration frameworks in addition to Cattle, Rancher’s native orchestrator. The first framework to arrive was Kubernetes, and not long after, Docker Swarm was added. This week, the team at Rancher added support for Mesos.