The balance between modernizing IT infrastructure and preserving existing investments presents a major concern for the U.S. Government. Tricia Fitzmaurice, Vice President of Sales at Rancher Government Solutions (RGS), shares how RGS is transforming the approach to IT modernization, giving government customers and partners unparalleled flexibility and choice. Allowing them to leverage new technologies without the constraints of vendor lock-in or hardware limitations, ensuring a future-proof IT environment.

Overview and Introduction

In today's highly connected world, we sometimes forget that there are many instances, especially in the government, where environments need to be intentionally isolated from external connectivity, creating what is known as an air-gapped or disconnected environment. In some cases, these environments may have external connectivity, but that connectivity is extremely unreliable or is limited in it's communication, creating what is known as a denied, disrupted, intermittent, and limited impact environment.

In this deployment guide, we will be effortlessly installing the core Rancher Stack, including Rancher Kubernetes, Rancher Multi-Cluster Manger, Longhorn, and NeuVector. In about 15 minutes, we will have a three-node Kubernetes Cluster (RKE2), with lifecycle management (Rancher Manager), persistent storage (Longhorn), and cluster security (NeuVector).

In this repo, we're going to cover the creation of a RKE2 cluster into Harvester using an airgapped process (aka Bootstrap!). We'll follow that up by installing Rancher on top of RKE2. We're going to do all of this using Terraform. Terraform allows us to declaratively define our environment in code and then create that environment in a straight-forward (and sustainable) way.

Over the last few years, Kubernetes has revolutionized the world of infrastructure and application distribution. From bare-metal servers to virtual machines to containers, Kubernetes has compelled teams to re-evaluate their entire technology stack – in the very best way possible. However, for many teams, Kubernetes is seen as a tall mountain to climb. But it doesn’t have to be.

You can perform no-code deployments of Rancher Kubernetes on the AWS GovCloud!

Throughout my career there has always been a disconnect between the documentation and the practical implementation. The Kubernetes (k8s) ecosystem is no stranger to this problem. This guide is a simple approach to installing Kubernetes and some REALLY useful tools. We will walk through installing all the following.

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.

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.