Rancher 2.0 Beta is now officially released! This is the most important milestone release ahead of Rancher 2.0 GA at the end of April, the Rancher 2.0 master branch now contains all key features, and the Rancher Labs team is about to enter the final beta phase, with a focus on testing, documentation, and extensibility.
Since the release of Rancher 2.0 Technical Preview I in September 2017, the Rancher Labs R&D team has continued to carry out Rancher 2.0 functional development and code refactoring, and has continued to release Rancher 2.0 Technical Preview II and III, and received feedback from customers and extremely positive feedback from the open source community. Rancher 2.0 development, which lasted for a year, has officially entered its final stage, and Rancher 2.0 Beta is the last major feature set in Rancher 2.0.
Rancher 2.0 is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform that enables you to centrally manage all Kubernetes distributions and all Kubernetes clusters across all clouds. Rancher 2.0 consists of 3 main components: Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE), Unified Cluster Management and Workload Management.
Rancher Kubernetes Hiki (RKE)
1. Lightweight Kubernetes Installer
For the convenience of users who wish to deploy Kubernetes on vSphere clusters, bare metal servers, and cloud providers that do not support managed Kubernetes, RKE is embedded in Rancher 2.0.
**2. Simple Kubernetes operation**
Rancher supports ongoing operations of Kubernetes clusters, such as cluster upgrades and etcd backups.
3. Drive Rancher server high availability
Rancher can be installed into an existing Kubernetes cluster, which can be a small RKE cluster created to run the Rancher server.
Unified cluster management
1. Cluster and Node Management
Whether it's a Kubernetes cluster hosted by a cloud provider (Google GKE, Microsoft AKS, Amazon EKS, Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, etc.), a newly created Kubernetes cluster using RKE, or an existing Kubernetes cluster imported from elsewhere, Rancher Both platforms 2.0 support unified management of clusters and nodes.
2. Certification
Rancher supports local authentication, Github, and AD/LDAP authentication for all GKE, AKS, EKS, RKS, imported clusters.
3. User management
Rancher supports two default user types, admin and user, and can define custom user types.
4. Role-Based Access Control
(Role Based Access Control, RBAC). Rancher users can create their own global cluster roles, which can easily assign jobs to any user to manage Kubernetes clusters and projects. Rancher includes all Kubernetes roles out of the box, and you can customize your own. Each role can be assigned at the global, cluster or project level.
5. Project and Namespace Management
Users can create namespaces and assign them to projects. A "project" is a new Rancher concept that lets you group a set of namespaces and assign user permissions to those namespaces.
6. Pod Security Policy
Rancher 2.0 lets users create their own pod security policies, as well as create security policies that apply to roles.
7. Rancher CLI
The CLI supports all major Rancher 2.0 feature sets.
Workload Management
1. Workload UI
Rancher has introduced a new workload UI that users can leverage to simply create and manage their Kubernetes workloads.
2. Helm directory support
Rancher 2.0's Catalog (application catalog) is built on Helm charts.
3. Alarm management
Rancher 2.0 leverages Prometheus AlertManager to send system and user-level alerts to various notifiers including Slack, Email, PagerDuty, and Webhooks.
4. Log Management
Fluentd is installed in Rancher 2.0 to collect stdout/err output or logs written to specific directories. Rancher 2.0 supports a variety of log targets, including ElasticSearch, Splunk, Syslog, and Kafka.
5. CI/CD Pipeline
Rancher 2.0 includes a simple integration pipeline function, users can create pipelines in the project to achieve continuous integration.
Migrating from Rancher 1.6 to Rancher 2.0
We initially planned to support both Rancher Compose files and Kubernetes YAML templates in Rancher 2.0. This makes migrating from Rancher 1.6 to Rancher 2.0 very easy: you can replay your existing compose files on Rancher 2.0.
Unfortunately, however, we encountered significant technical challenges when trying to implement a fully compatible Rancher Compose experience on Kubernetes. Kubernetes supports many concepts similar to Cattle. However, there are often still important differences between the two that make the conversion job very difficult. Earlier versions of Rancher 2.0 Tech Preview I converted the Rancher Compose structure into Pods, bypassing Kubernetes orchestration. But according to user feedback, this is not the most correct solution. Instead, we found a fair amount of Cattle community users to be very interested in the capabilities of Kubernetes, and because of the similarities between Cattle and Kubernetes, creating a Kubernetes YAML file from Rancher Compose is not too difficult.
Therefore, we decided to focus on supporting Kubernetes YAML templates in Rancher 2.0 alone, and developing tools and practices to help Cattle users migrate to Kubernetes during the Rancher 2.0 to Rancher 2.1 time frame. Of course, Rancher Labs will continue to support Rancher 1.6 for at least a year. As the emerging container industry develops, we will continue to pay attention to the needs of the Cattle user community.
Throughout the Rancher 2.0 project, we were tasked with changing Rancher from Docker-based to Kubernetes-based. We rewrote all legacy Rancher 1.6 Java modules in Go, touching almost every other module in the system in the process. Dozens of core developers at Rancher Labs are working on the project at the same time. The fact that so many developers are able to collaborate and act so quickly is also a testament to the modularity and maturity of the Kubernetes platform. We are also more confident that Kubernetes will be the foundational platform for enterprise applications.
Epilogue
The simple and intuitive interface style and operation experience of Rancher 2.0 will solve the problems of poor ease of use and steep learning curve of Kubernetes native UI that have been left in the industry for a long time. The creative multi-Kubernetes cluster management function of Rancher 2.0 will solve the dilemma of different infrastructures that enterprise users may face in the production environment. Coupled with a series of extended functions such as monitoring, logging, CI/CD brought by Rancher 2.0, it can be said that Rancher 2.0 provides a more convenient way for enterprises to implement Kubernetes in the production environment.
Adhering to Rancher's 100% open source style and philosophy, you can download and experience the latest version of Rancher 2.0 directly from GitHub: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases
Rancher WeChat official account (RancherLabs) responds to "architecture" in the background, and you can download the architecture document of Rancher 2.0!
Want to see a demo of Rancher 2.0 and learn more about Rancher 2.0 in action? Welcome to the online training on the evening of April 19: Managing Kubernetes Clusters with Rancher 2.0