Monitoring and gathering metrics on your systems is an essential part of the lifecycle of any machine, application, or cluster. It provides us with the insight needed to be more proactive and less reactive to what our systems are doing. Gathering and viewing numerical data, like CPU load or memory usage, is something that is done with ease and looks great in a graph, but what about the massive amounts of log data out there? Historically, this was not something that you could easily put into a graph and it’s not always easily correlated with other events.

To the uninitiated, Kubernetes does a fairly simple thing: it provides the scaffolding to effortlessly run applications with very complex architectures. Rancher has built on top of this scaffolding, making it easy not only to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters but also applications. With Kubernetes, a lot of established paradigms of software development are evolving, oftentimes forcing many structural changes for the organizations. Things that many IT and procurement departments started to take for granted with the adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), like cost allocation, get a new meaning and new complexity with Kubernetes.

It goes without saying that backing up Kubernetes Components is an essential part of any Kubernetes Administrator, especially in production environments. While it has always been possible to write a home-grown solution, we here at Rancher want to make it as easy as possible to protect your Rancher-based clusters. Not only does backing up Rancher components protect you in the event of an failed upgrade or other disasters, but it’s also a great way to migrate Rancher to a completely different cluster.

For the better part of a decade, we developers and operators have relied on the Docker Hub and their image repository for our needs. This has been great for the growth of the technology, but this growth has necessitated a change to how Docker makes money. As such, Docker is rate limiting anonymous and authenticated users.