SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher Labs gave it possession of the popular Kubernetes management program Rancher, the latest release of the latter’s Kubernetes management platform. SUSE promised that it would continue to deliver 100% open-source software with no vendor lock-in.
With the release of Rancher 2.6, it would appear that SUSE kept that promise.
The new Rancher has significant updates across all its supported clouds and platforms. The platform’s redesigns offer a better user interface, full lifecycle management of hosted Kube clusters in Microsoft AKS and Google GKE alongside existing Amazon EKS capabilities.
What else is good in version 2.6
Other updates to the release include features meant to aid security, risk, and compliance. If you are a multi-cloud user, Rancher allows you to easily manage, secure and operate the multi-cloud clusters. Even better, you can import and manage your existing hosted clusters across cloud deployments.
For a long time now, Kube supporters have promised to help users build hybrid clouds with the platform. That was easier said than done. However, Rancher looks to have taken a big step to make it come true.
The new version brings Rancher closer to making the vision of running Kube everywhere look plausible, with architectural support for one million clusters.
The results of a better Rancher
Steve Delaney, Cloud Enterprise Architect at Schneider electric, sees this happening and said that in 2020, the company’s Rancher platform experienced a 92% increase in the number of projects onboarded. It sees the same high level of engagement in 2021 too.
SUSE Rancher 2.6 will serve to increase demand for AKS and EKS support while offering the operations team a single dashboard through which to support the demand.
SUSE Rancher 2.6 has also added integration with SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images that include Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15 SP3, SLES 15 SP2, and SLES 12 SP5.