Containerization and microservices architecture have become foundational in modern software development and operations. Gartner predicts that by 2026, over 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, up from less than 40% in 2021. This shift brings both opportunities and complexity for enterprise IT. 

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.

Recently the NeuVector team released NeuVector version 5.2. This new feature added some much-needed features for our Government customers. This post will walk through those features and how to implement them.

Data security is becoming increasingly important to our customers. One of the great features of Longhorn is the ability to encrypt the volumes at rest. This blog is all about how to do that. Encrypting data volumes at rest means the data on the nodes is encrypted. For added security, we will want at least three nodes for high availability.

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.

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.