From million-cluster deployments to the IoT: Rancher Labs' goals for Kubernetes

Rancher has big - and small - plans for the container orchestration platform

Kubernetes has taken the software world by storm, providing a convenient and flexible way to take the pain out of deploying and managing applications in containers. It's safe to say that we're just at the start of seeing what it's capable of.

While there is a healthy take-up by enterprises (a recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey found that 78 per cent of respondents were using Kubernetes in production compared with 58 per cent last year), many of these deployments are small, or at least not as large as they might be. After all, many applications are not conducive to containerisation, and to most developers and architects microservices remains something of a mystery. In the grand scheme of things, it's still early days.

Another limiting factor is that when deployments reach a certain size, managing and maintaining all the clusters can become increasingly complex.

Container management company Rancher Labs is betting that all this is about to change. For a start, enterprise software will start to be delivered in containers; containers will become standard rather than exotic. Organisations will also be looking to avoid lock-in and make the most of new developments by looking for platforms that are able to run anywhere, on any cloud or on-premises. The company also predicts that Kubernetes deployments will grow simultaneously larger - perhaps up to a million clusters - and smaller, with containers increasingly deployed on edge devices such as cameras, sensors and cars.

"We have this view, validated by MSPs we talk to, that the world is going to be lots of small clusters and not one big cluster. So there'll be lots of clusters to manage across a very heterogeneous environment," said Olivier Maes, managing director EMEA at Rancher Labs.

To cater for all these different environments (what the company is keen to call 'web scale to edge scale'), Rancher Labs offers three distinct Kubernetes products. RKE is a platform-agnostic distribution that runs entirely in Docker containers, Rancher is a Kubernetes management platform, while K3S is a lightweight distribution for the edge devices which launched last year.

K3S is central to the company's thinking said, Tom Callway, global director of product marketing. "This is the beginning of a push to the edge for us. There's really a demand for data-hungry workloads, AI/ML-type workloads, 5G, and having those as close to the end-user as possible at the network edge."

Uptake of K3S is currenly most enthusiastic in telcos (EMEA customers include Orange and Deutsche Telecom), he went on, but banks, retail and manufacturing are other hotspots for edge computing.

At the other end of the scale, Rancher 2.4, released with general availability today, is now capable of managing 2,000 Kubernetes clusters or 100,000 nodes. Not the million -cluster capability the company is aiming for, but that may be possible with the next release, Callway said.

Another development is rolling upgrades in RKE, which the company claims should mean zero downtime. "It's moving on from the blue/green upgrade, which doesn't really match the velocity developers need when it comes to Kubernetes," said Callway.

Elsewhere, security is being beefed up with CIS benchmarks embedded in Rancher and there's a hosted offering for enterprise customers promoted as solving some of the security issues around configuring and deploying Kubernetes.

Rancher Labs recently announced collaborations with processor designer ARM on IoT devices and there's a reference architecture available for HPE. The company completed a $40 million Series-D funding-raising round taking total investment to $95 million.