Tag Archives: kubernetes

Rancher Labs Announces 2.5

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Rancher Labs recently announced version 2.5 of its platform. I had the opportunity to catch up with co-founder and CEO Sheng Liang about the release and other things that Rancher has been up to and thought I’d share some of my notes here.

 

Introducing Rancher Labs 2.5

Liang described Rancher as a way for organisations to “[f]ocus on enriching their own apps, rather than trying to be a day 1, day 2 K8s outfit”. With that thinking in mind, the new features in 2.5 are as follows:

  1. Rancher now installs everywhere – on EKS, OpenShift, whatever – and they’ve removed a bunch of dependencies. Rancher 2.5 can now be installed on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster, eliminating the need to set up a separate Kubernetes cluster before installing Rancher. The new lightweight installation experience is useful for users who already have access to a cloud-managed Kubernetes service like EKS.
  2. Enhanced management for EKS. Rancher Labs was a launch partner for EKS and used to treat it like a dumb distribution. The management architecture has been revamped with improved lifecycle management for EKS. It now uses the native EKS way of doing various things and only adds value where it’s not already present.
  3. Managing edge clusters. Liang described K3s as “almost the goto distribution for edge computing (5G, IoT, ATMs, etc)”. When you get into some of these scenarios, the scale of operations is becoming pretty big. You need to re-think multi-cluster management when you have that in place. Rancher has introduced a GitOps framework to do that. “GitOps at scale” – created its own GitOp framework to accommodate the required scale.
  4. K8s has plenty of traction in government and high security environments, hence the development of RKE Government Edition.

 

Other Notes

Liang mentioned that Longhorn uptake (made generally available in May 2020) has been great, with over 10000 active deployments (not just downloads) in the wild now. He noted that persistent storage with K8s has been hard to do, and Longhorn has gone some way to improving that experience. K3s is now a CNCF Sandbox project, not just a Rancher project, and this has certainly helped with its popularity as well. He also mentioned the acquisition by SUSE was continuing to progress, and expected it would be closed in Q4, 2020.

 

Thoughts and Further Reading

Longtime readers of this blog will know that my background is fairly well entrenched in infrastructure as opposed to cloud-native technologies. Liang understands this, and always does a pretty good job of translating some of the concepts he talks about with me back into infrastructure terms. The world continues to change, though, and the popularity of Kubernetes and solutions like Rancher Labs highlights that it’s no longer a simple conversation about LUNs, CPUs, network throughput and which server I’ll use to host my application. Organisations are looking for effective ways to get the most out of their technology investment, and Kubernetes can provide an extremely effective way of deploying and running containerised applications in an agile and efficient fashion. That said, the bar for entry into the cloud-native world can still be considered pretty high, particularly when you need to do things at large scale. This is where I think platforms like the one from Rancher Labs make so much sense. I may have described some elements of cloud-native architecture as a bin fire previously, but I think the progress that Rancher is making demonstrates just how far we’ve come. I know that VMware and Kubernetes has little in common, but it strikes me that we’re seeing the same development progress that we saw 15 years ago with VMware (and ESX in particular). I remember at the time that VMware seemed like a whole bunch of weird to many infrastructure folks, and it wasn’t until much later that these same people were happily using VMware in every part of the data centre. I suspect that the adoption of Kubernetes (and useful management frameworks for it) will be a bit quicker than that, but it’s going to be heavily reliant on solutions like this to broaden the appeal of what’s a very useful (but nonetheless challenging) container deployment and management ecosystem.

If you’re in the APAC region, Rancher is hosting a webinar in a friendly timezone later this month. You can get more details on that here. And if you’re on US Eastern time, there’s the “Computing on the Edge with Kubernetes” one day event that’s worth checking out.

Rancher Labs Announces Longhorn General Availability

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This happened a little while ago, and the news about Rancher Labs has shifted to Suse’s announcement regarding its intent to acquire Rancher Labs. Nonetheless, I had a chance to speak to Sheng Liang (Co-founder and CEO) about Longhorn’s general availability, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.

 

What Is It?

Described by Rancher Labs as “an enterprise-grade, cloud-native container storage solution”, Longhorn has been in development for around 6 years, in beta for a year, and is now generally available. It’s comprised of around 40k lines of Golang code, and each volume is a set of independent micro-services, orchestrated by Kubernetes.

Liang described this to me as “enterprise-grade distributed block storage for K8S”, and the features certainly seem to line up with those expectations. There’s support for:

  • Thin-provisioning, snapshots, backup, and restore
  • Non-disruptive volume expansion
  • Cross-cluster disaster recovery volume with defined RTO and RPO
  • Live upgrade of Longhorn software without impacting running volumes
  • Full-featured Kubernetes CLI integration and standalone UI

From a licensing perspective, Longhorn is free to download and use, and customers looking for support can purchase a premium support model with the same SLAs provided through Rancher Support Services. There are no licensing fees, and node-based subscription pricing keeps costs to a minimum.

Use Cases

Why would you use it?

  • Bare metal workloads
  • Edge persistent
  • Geo-replicated storage for Amazon EKS
  • Application backup and disaster recovery

 

Thoughts

One of the barriers to entry when moving from traditional infrastructure to cloud-native is that concepts seem slightly different to the comfortable slippers you may have been used to in enterprise infrastructure land. The neat thing about Longhorn is that it leverages a lot of the same concepts you’ll see in traditional storage deployments to deliver resilient and scalable persistent storage for Kubernetes.

This doesn’t mean that Rancher Labs is trying to compete with traditional storage vendors like Pure Storage and NetApp when it comes to delivering persistent storage for cloud workloads. Liang acknowledges that these shops can offer more storage features than Longhorn can. There seems to be nonetheless a requirement for this kind of accessible and robust solution. Plus it’s 100% open source.

Rancher Labs already has a good story to tell when it comes to making Kubernetes management a whole lot simpler. The addition of Longhorn simply improves that story further. If you’re feeling curious about Longhorn and would like to know more, this website has a lot of useful information.

Spectro Cloud – Profile-Based Kubernetes Management For The Enterprise

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Spectro Cloud launched in March. I recently had the opportunity to speak to Tenry Fu (CEO) and Tina Nolte (VP, Products) about the launch, and what Spectro Cloud is, and thought I’d share some notes here.

 

The Problem?

I was going to start this article by saying that Kubernetes in the enterprise is a bin fire, but that’s too harsh (and entirely unfair on the folks who are doing it well). There is, however, a frequent compromise being made between ease of use, control, and visibility.

[image courtesy of Spectro Cloud]

According to Fu, the way that enterprises consume Kubernetes shouldn’t just be on the left or the right side of the diagram. There is a way to do both.

 

The Solution?

According to the team, Spectro Cloud is “a SaaS platform that gives Enterprises control over Kubernetes infrastructure stack integrations, consistently and at scale”. What does that mean though? Well, you get access to the “table stakes” SaaS management, including:

  • Managed Kubernetes experience;
  • Multi-cluster and environment management; and
  • Enterprise features.

Profile-Based Management

You also get some cool stuff that heavily leverages profile-based management, including infrastructure stack modelling and lifecycle management that can be done based on integration policies. In short, you build cluster profiles and then apply them to your infrastructure. The cluster profile usually describes the OS flavour and version, Kubernetes version, storage configuration, networking drivers, and so on. The Pallet orchestrator then ensures these profiles are used to maintain the desired cluster state. There are also security-hardened profiles available out of the box.

If you’re a VMware-based cloud user, the appliance (deployed from an OVA file) sits in your on-premises VMware cloud environment and communicates with the Spectro Cloud SaaS offering over TLS, and the cloud properties are dynamically propagated.

Licensing

The solution is licensed on the number of worker node cores under management. This is tiered based on the number of cores and it follows a simple model: More cores and a longer commitment equals a bigger discount.

 

The Differentiator?

Current Kubernetes deployment options vary in their complexity and maturity. You can take the DIY path, but you might find that this option is difficult to maintain at scale. There are packaged options available, such as VMware Tanzu, but you might find that multi-cluster management is not always a focus. The managed Kubernetes option (such as those offered by Google and AWS) has its appeal to the enterprise crowd, but those offerings are normally quite restricted in terms of technology offerings and available versions.

Why does Spectro Cloud have appeal as a solution then? Because you get control over the integrations you might want to use with your infrastructure, but also get the warm and fuzzy feeling of leveraging a managed service experience.

 

Thoughts

I’m no great fan of complexity for complexity’s sake, particularly when it comes to enterprise IT deployments. That said, there are always reasons why things get complicated in the enterprise. Requirements come from all parts of the business, legacy applications need to be fed and watered, rules and regulations seem to be in place simply to make things difficult. Enterprise application owners crave solutions like Kubernetes because there’s some hope that they, too, can deliver modern applications if only they used some modern application deployment and management constructs. Unfortunately, Kubernetes can be a real pain in the rear to get right, particularly at scale. And if enterprise has taught us anything, it’s that most enterprise shops are struggling to do the basics well, let alone the needlessly complicated stuff.

Solutions like the one from Spectro Cloud aren’t a silver bullet for enterprise organisations looking to modernise the way applications are deployed, scaled, and managed. But something like Spectro Cloud certainly has great appeal given the inherent difficulties you’re likely to experience if you’re coming at this from a standing start. Sure, if you’re a mature Kubernetes shop, chances are slim that you really need something like this. But if you’re still new to it, or are finding that the managed offerings don’t give you the flexibility you might need, then something like Spectro Cloud could be just what you’re looking for.

Random Short Take #30

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Welcome to Random Short Take #30. You’d think 30 would be an easy choice, given how much I like Wardell Curry II, but for this one I’m giving a shout out to Rasheed Wallace instead. I’m a big fan of ‘Sheed. I hope you all enjoy these little trips down NBA memory lane. Here we go.

  • Veeam 10’s release is imminent. Anthony has been doing a bang up job covering some of the enhancements in the product. This article was particularly interesting because I work in a company selling Veeam and using vCloud Director.
  • Sticking with data protection, Curtis wrote an insightful article on backups and frequency.
  • If you’re in Europe or parts of the US (or can get there easily), like writing about technology, and you’re into cars and stuff, this offer from Cohesity could be right up your alley.
  • I was lucky enough to have a chat with Sheng Liang from Rancher Labs a few weeks ago about how it’s going in the market. I’m relatively Kubernetes illiterate, but it sounds like there’s a bit going on.
  • For something completely different, this article from Christian on Raspberry Pi, volumio and HiFiBerry was great. Thanks for the tip!
  • Spinning disk may be as dead as tape, if these numbers are anything to go by.
  • This was a great article from Matt Crape on home lab planning.
  • Speaking of home labs, Shanks posted an interesting article on what he has running. The custom-built rack is inspired.

Random Short Take #28

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New year, same old format for news bites. This is #28 – the McKinnie Edition. I always thought Alfonzo looked a bit like that cop in The Deuce. Okay – it’s clear that some of these numbers are going to be hard to work with, but I’ll keep it going for a little while longer (the 30s are where you find a lot of the great players).

  • In what seems like pretty big news, Veeam has been acquired by Insight Partners. You can read the press release here, and Anton Gostev shares his views on it here.
  • This one looks like a bit of a science project, but I find myself oddly intrigued by it. You can read the official announcement here. Pre-orders are open now, and I’ll report back some time in March or April when / if the box turns up.
  • I loved this article from Chin-Fah on ransomware and NAS environments. I’m looking forward to catching up with Chin-Fah next week (along with all of the other delegates) at Storage Field Day 19. Tune in here if you want to see us on camera.
  • Speaking of ransomware, this article from Joey D’Antoni provided some great insights into the problem and what we can do about it.
  • A lot of my friends overseas are asking about the bush fires in Australia. There’s a lot in the media about it, and this article about the impact on infrastructure from Preston made for some thought-provoking reading.
  • I still use Plex heavily, and spend a lot of time moving things from optical discs to my NAS. This article covers a lot of the process I use too. I’ve started using tinyMediaManager as well – it’s pretty neat.
  • All the kids (and vendor executives) are talking about Kubernetes. It’s almost like we’re talking about public cloud or big data. Inspired in part by what he saw at Cloud Field Day 6, Keith weighs in on the subject here and I recommend you take the time to read (and understand) what he’s saying.
  • I enjoy reading Justin’s disclosure posts, even when he throws shade on my state (“Queensland is Australia’s Florida”). Not that he’s wrong, mind you.

Datera Announces Integration With Google’s Kubernetes

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Datera-250x33

It’s the season for interesting announcements in the storage world. I don’t post about everything I get briefed on, but I do like to put up information on things I think are pretty cool. I first came across Datera at Storage Field Day 10. You can read my write-up on them here. I’m a fan of what they’re doing, and their platform is developing at quite a pace. So I was pleased to get a message from their CEO Marc Fleischmann wanting to tell me about a new integration they’ve developed for Google’s Kubernetes. Rather than go into it here, I thought it simpler to link to their press release and an article on the Datera blog.

According to Datera, this integration gives Kubernetes some additional grunt, including the ability to automatically:

  • Tailor runtime storage capabilities for each stateful application;
  • Scale applications; and
  • Isolate and protect them with dedicated storage segments.

I think it’s worth checking out the excellent demo video which covers a lot of the capability. If you’re looking to add some scalable, persistent storage to your Kubernetes deployment, Datera might be just what you need.