rancher.com Rancher is enterprise management for Kubernetes, an amazing GUI for managing and installing Kubernetes clusters. They have released a number of pieces of software that are part of this ecosystem, for example Longhorn which is a lightweight and reliable distributed block storage system for Kubernetes.
dzone: Getting Started With Rancher 🌟 What is Rancher? And how does it make Kubernetes crazy easy? Rancher is a complete Kubernetes stack that’s easy to navigate — whether it’s physical servers on-prem or in the cloud. This Refcard helps you get started with Rancher — from zero to fully production-ready.
Kubernetes is the leader in container orchestration. It offers teams the flexibility to efficiently run containerized workloads across multiple public cloud providers and hybrid cloud environments. Kubernetes offers advanced scheduling and scaling capabilities to ensure application performance and high availability. However, its functionality focuses on managing resources within a single cluster.
Rancher, on the other hand, is a platform designed to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters. It eases Kubernetes cluster management in large environments in several ways. For example, Rancher simplifies operations such as cluster provisioning, centralized security management, and monitoring workloads using popular tools such as Prometheus. Additionally, Rancher has an extensive application catalog of Helm charts for various applications such as Kubecost, Prometheus, Grafana, and MySQL.
rancherdesktop.io Kubernetes and container management to the desktop. Rancher Desktop is an open-source project to bring Kubernetes and container management to the desktop.
Rancher Academy 🌟 Rancher Academy is a professional, no-cost, zero obligation certification program centered on empowering commercial customers and the open source community to be successful with Kubernetes and Rancher.
Rancher 2 RKE Rancher 2 that runs in docker containers. RKE is a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution that runs entirely within Docker containers. It solves the common frustration of installation complexity with Kubernetes by removing most host dependencies and presenting a stable path for deployment, upgrades, and rollbacks.
k3s Basic kubernetes with automated installer. Lightweight Kubernetes Distribution.
K8s vs k3s “K3s is designed to be a single binary of less than 40MB that completely implements the Kubernetes API. In order to achieve this, they removed a lot of extra drivers that didn’t need to be part of the core and are easily replaced with add-ons. K3s is a fully CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) certified Kubernetes offering. This means that you can write your YAML to operate against a regular “full-fat” Kubernetes and they’ll also apply against a k3s cluster. Due to its low resource requirements, it’s possible to run a cluster on anything from 512MB of RAM machines upwards. This means that we can allow pods to run on the master, as well as nodes. And of course, because it’s a tiny binary, it means we can install it in a fraction of the time it takes to launch a regular Kubernetes cluster! We generally achieve sub-two minutes to launch a k3s cluster with a handful of nodes, meaning you can be deploying apps to learn/test at the drop of a hat.”
k3sup (said ‘ketchup’) is a light-weight utility to get from zero to KUBECONFIG with k3s on any local or remote VM. All you need is ssh access and the k3sup binary to get kubectl access immediately.
github.com/aws-samples/cdk-k3s-cluster 🌟 is a new JSII construct library for AWS CDK that deploys a scalable Kubernetes K3s cluster on Graviton2 Arm-based (mg6 by default) Spot instances with one command on AWS.
gabrieltanner.org: Setting up a HA Kubernetes cluster using K3S In this article, you will set up your own high availability K3S cluster and create a basic Kubernetes deployment. The tutorial will show how to set up all the resources manually and you will learn how to automate it with the official Ansible script.
Try out the Kubernetes 1.23 with K3s distro: curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io |INSTALL_K3S_VERSION="v1.23.1-rc1+k3s1" sh - You can try on ubuntu katakoda playground in your browser :)
tinyzimmer/k3p A k3s packager and installer, primarily intended for airgapped deployments
alexellis/k3sup bootstrap Kubernetes with k3s over SSH < 1 min 🚀. k3sup is a light-weight utility to get from zero to KUBECONFIG with k3s on any local or remote VM. All you need is ssh access and the k3sup binary to get kubectl access immediately.
k3OS k3OS is a Linux distribution designed to remove as much OS maintenance as possible in a Kubernetes cluster. It is specifically designed to only have what is needed to run k3s. Additionally the OS is designed to be managed by kubectl once a cluster is bootstrapped. Nodes only need to join a cluster and then all aspects of the OS can be managed from Kubernetes. Both k3OS and k3s upgrades are handled by the k3OS operator.
K3OS runs on x86 and ARM processors to give you maximum flexibility.
Runs only the minimum required services
Fewer services means a tiny attack surface, for greater security.
Doesn’t require a package manager
The required services are built into the distribution image.
Models infrastructure as code
Manage system configuration with version control systems.
K3C
K3C Lightweight local container engine for container development. K3C is a local container engine designed to fill the same gap Docker does in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Specifically k3c focuses on developing and running local containers, basically docker run/build. Currently k3s, the lightweight Kubernetes distribution, provides a great solution for Kubernetes from dev to production. While k3s satisifies the Kubernetes runtime needs, one still needs to run docker (or a docker-like tool) to actually develop and build the container images. k3c is intended to replace docker for just the functionality needed for the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Rancher Fleet to manage multiple kubernetes clusters
github.com/rancher/fleet Fleet is GitOps at scale. Fleet can manage deployments from git of raw Kubernetes YAML, Helm charts, or Kustomize or any combination of the three.
Fleet Management for kubernetes a new open source project from the team at Rancher focused on managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters.
Kubernautic Kubernetes For Everyone, Free Forever! Start your CloudLess Journey and get free access to Rancher Shared as a Service (RSaaS) or apply to get access to your own Dedicated Rancher Dashboard (RDaaS) and save up-to 90% of your cloud costs with Auto Scaling of Spot Instances and Kubernauts Kubernetes Services KKS!
Harvester Hyperconverged Infrastructure Software
Harvester Rancher Harvester is an open source hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software built on Kubernetes. It is an open source alternative to vSphere and Nutanix.
