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Bogdan Marian edited this page Feb 23, 2018 · 29 revisions

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a basic understanding of Rancher v1.x.

All commands found inside this workshop were executed inside a Git Bash terminal, running on a Windows 10 Pro machine with Docker Machine and VirtualBox.

Table of Contents

What Is Rancher?

  • Rancher is a container management platform
  • Supports different orchestration engines
    • Cattle
      • Delegates the actual work to Rancher Compose (= multi-host aware Docker Compose)
    • Docker Swarm
    • Kubernetes
    • Mesos
    • Windows (experimental support)
  • Able to schedule workload on a series of heterogeneous hosts grouped into environments
    • On-premises machines: physical & virtual (OOTB support for vSphere)
    • Cloud provided virtual machines (Amazon, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.)
    • Can use custom Docker Machine driver
  • Groups containers into hierarchies
    • Rancher Server
      • Environment [1, N]
        • Stack [0, N]
          • Service [0, N]
            • Container [1, N]
        • Stand-alone container [0, N]

Feature List

Common

  • Scalable, with almost no limits, but the cloud’s (and your wallet)
  • Offers better hardware utilization
    • Dedicated VM vs Docker host
  • Schedule workload via labels
    • Fat to skinny hosts, they are all welcomed!
  • Container colocation via sidekick services
  • OOTB support for load balancing
  • Catalogs (= parameterized Docker Compose)
    • OOTB catalogs
    • Custom catalogs
  • Rancher CLI
  • Web API
  • Webhooks
    • Respond to outside world events

Enterprise

  • Security
    • Audit
    • Access control
      • LDAP, GitHub, etc.
    • Secrets (experimental)
  • High Availability
  • Supports different operating systems (with different level of feature coverage)
  • UI
    • Intuitive & easy to use
    • Homogeneous
    • Eye candy

And many other features!

Why Should I Use Rancher?

  • Impressive feature list
  • Built having in mind the enterprise
    • Documentation, HA, scalability, security, support, etc.
  • Allows better & easier project resource management
    • Do you know EXACTLY what VMs are you still using on your project?
  • Flexible container orchestration via its multiple supported engines
    • One server, multiple environments: Cattle, k8s, etc.
  • Perfectly complements Jenkins or any other CI server
    • Jenkins is an automation platform, not built for running complex container setup
  • Paradigm switch: request service instead of hardware
    • Run my app vs. gimme some VMs so I may run my app
  • Catalogs
    • Opens the door for non-technical persons
  • Plenty of things to quickly make you productive
    • Blog, documentation, videos, etc.

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