Rancher Labs takes Kubernetes to the edge and beyond, as it strengthens its product line

Rancher Labs announced general availability of K3s, its lightweight, certified Kubernetes distribution purpose built for small footprint workloads, along with the beta release of Rio, their new application deployment engine for Kubernetes that delivers a fully integrated deployment experience from operations to pipeline.

Although many enterprises now include Kubernetes in their strategic edge initiatives, Kubernetes in its upstream form is too heavy and operationally challenging for edge use-cases. Rancher Labs originally created K3s as a lightweight Kubernetes distribution designed for use in edge production environments and has been working with Arm to optimize for these workloads. 

Rio is targeted squarely at addressing the inherent complexity of building, deploying, and managing containerized applications. Designed for use by developers and DevOps teams, Rio makes it fast and easy to build, test, deploy, scale, and version stateless apps in any Kubernetes cluster. 

Capabilities of Rio include lightweight, cloud-native platform that delivers a fully integrated deployment experience from operations to pipeline without taking over the cluster; and easily installed using Rancher’s App Catalog and also runs on any Kubernetes cluster anywhere, even on a laptop, handling all wiring for common services like Istio, Knative, and Prometheus.

It also comes with Rancher’s built-in security capabilities around cluster performance, multitenancy and encryption allow applications to launch with the most secure network configuration possible.

Because of its lightweight design and simple operation, K3s is also being adopted for use cases beyond the edge. 

“Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard for container orchestration,” stated Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO, of Rancher Labs. With our investments in K3s and Rio, and our recently announced Rancher v2.3, we are completing our Kubernetes-as-a-service solution stack for ITOps and DevOps teams.”

Civo, a cloud solutions provider, who has created the initial K3s-powered, managed Kubernetes service. 

“Our #KUBE100 K3s platform is a learning playground where those new to containers can test the water, risk and cost-free,” said Andy Jeffries, CTO at Civo. “K3s is so lightweight we can install it in under two minutes - a fraction of the time it takes to launch a regular Kubernetes cluster. With K3s, developers can spin up new clusters, deploy apps and test easily - at speed.”

Rancher Labs industry survey shows rapid adoption of Kubernetes for production workloads

Rancher Labs released Wednesday highlights of a survey of 1,106 tech users at large and small enterprises across a broad range of more than 25 industries, including technology, financial services, telecom, education, government and healthcare. The respondents were almost evenly split among EMEA and North America.

The results of the survey illustrate rapid adoption of containers and Kubernetes. Key findings include 85 percent of respondents are running containers in production; with Kubernetes emerging as the standard for container management with 90 percent of respondents using it for orchestration.

Architects, developers, and DevOps are the primary drivers of adoption (69 percent) followed by IT operations (30 percent), while multiple cluster environments are becoming the norm with 91 percent of respondents running multiple clusters, and 45 percent planning multiple clusters within six months.

The most common use cases for containers are designing microservices (71 percent), building customer facing applications (70 percent), and modernizing legacy applications (53 percent). Hybrid cloud deployments are prevalent with 71 percent of respondents running on-premises workloads, while 67 percent are running cloud-based applications. Edge is emerging as an important use-case with 15 percent of respondents deploying containers for edge workloads

As with any rapidly emerging technology, the survey also indicates that challenges remain, including complexity remains a barrier to entry with more than 62 percent of respondents not currently running containers citing that as the primary reason slowing adoption, while Windows container adoption is limited, although this is not surprising given Windows container support was only introduced in Kubernetes earlier this year.

Users are still wary of persistent storage due to complexity and perceived risk, while service mesh is perceived as complex which is limiting more widespread adoption.

“It’s clear from the survey results that containers have become a key pillar of modern IT strategy with 85% of respondents running containers in production,” said Peter Smails, CMO, Rancher Labs. “Additionally, 91% of respondents running more than one cluster combined with a healthy mix of on-premises and cloud-based deployments indicates multi-cluster / multi-cloud is emerging as a deployment strategy of choice.”

Rancher Labs’ Longhorn offering now part of Cloud Native Computing Foundation as Sandbox Project

Rancher Labs announced on Tuesday that The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has accepted Longhorn, its vendor-neutral container storage solution as its latest Sandbox project. Longhorn joins 20 other current projects and was accepted in recognition of the unique value it brings to the cloud-native ecosystem.

Key capabilities of Longhorn (currently v0.6.2) include enterprise-grade distributed block storage, volume snapshots, built-in backup and restore, live upgrades without impacting running volumes, cross-cluster disaster recovery with defined RTO and RPO, one-click installation, and an intuitive user interface. 

Longhorn is much simpler than traditional storage software. Longhorn implements its enterprise-grade storage features with only 30,000 lines of Go code, including both the data plane (Longhorn engine) and the management plane (Longhorn manager). Longhorn is lightweight because Rancher builds on storage technologies that already exist in the Linux operating system. The speed and capacity of modern storage hardware like SSD and NVMe also led to a greatly simplified design.

Most users interact with Longhorn through its free UI, and it exposes a storage class for easy provisioning of replicated volumes. Longhorn can be installed and upgraded with a few clicks, without needing to first read all of the documentation to understand every nuance. The Longhorn UI not only offers visibility into storage volumes, but it also helps teams understand the Kubernetes workload that created the volume.

Longhorn protects data at multiple levels. As enterprise-grade distributed storage, Longhorn replicates data synchronously across multiple nodes. Users can create snapshots directly in primary storage and revert to previous snapshots from the UI. They can also make backups of snapshots to secondary storage and recover the volume to the same cluster or a different one. 

Users can even create a read-only asynchronous replica in a different cluster, making it possible to quickly recover data and the application in case of a cluster failure.

As enterprises increasingly look to use containers to manage stateful apps -- any program that saves client data from the activities of one session for use in the next session – they require support for persistent storage. 

However, the market for persistent storage is still nascent with complexity and a lack of enterprise capabilities as key challenges. Longhorn helps teams manage stateful workloads in Kubernetes by providing a solution for persistent storage that can be deployed, while simplifying use and management.