Experience with Rancher

Simple and Fast with Cattle of Rancher

I write this article since someone asked me my experience with Rancher. We used Rancher in the time before we could use a managed Kubernetes (K8s) from the cloud providers and before SuSe bought it.

We had on-premise server landscape and we didn’t see that we could lower our costs by using cloud providers.

We were only a few developers and we didn’t want to do too much operations. Our expectations were:

The installation was very straightforward. The documentation was superb. Adding servers to the cluster was also very easy. Just add an agent on the server and let it managed from the master, that’s it. It was important to distribute the clusters on different servers and also to distribute your web apps on different clusters. We divided the clusters in DEV, TEST and PROD environments. Only our production cluster runs on many servers.

That’s it. The UI was really good, you could see the dependencies of your web apps within the Rancher clusters. You have everything you need from one UI console.

For just playing around you could install Rancher locally on your laptop. Like the server version you only need Docker to be installed first.

We had some cluster crashes but we could rebuilt it very fast. Still today in K8s (self managed K8s) we could have cluster crashes and the…

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