Rancher Labs introduced support for Windows containers, integration of Istio service mesh, and new cluster templates that provide enhanced security for large scale deployments of Kubernetes.
The new capabilities, which are included in the latest Rancher 2.3 release strengthen Rancher’s Run Kubernetes Everywhere strategy by enabling an even broader range of enterprises to leverage the transformative power of Kubernetes.
“Gartner estimates that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized workloads in production,” said Sheng Liang co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs. “Rancher 2.3 expands our market leadership by bringing the benefits of Kubernetes to Windows applications and providing enterprises global control and visibility of all containers no matter where they are running – from the data center, to the cloud, to the edge.”
Highlights:
- Support for Windows containers– Rancher 2.3 can now manage Windows Server Container based applications, allowing Windows developers to further benefit from the power of Kubernetes and its’ strong and diverse ecosystem
- Strengthened Kubernetes Security — Rancher 2.3 introduces cluster templates. Operators can create, save, and confidently reuse well-tested Kubernetes configurations across all their cluster deployments. Administrators can enable configuration enforcement, thereby eliminating configuration drift or improper misconfigurations which left unchecked can introduce security risks as more clusters are created.
- Support for the Istio Service Mesh — Istio eliminates the need for developers to write specific code to enable key Kubernetes capabilities including fault tolerance, canary rollouts, A/B testing, monitoring and metrics, tracing and observability and authentication and authorization. Rancher 2.3’s simplified installation and configuration of Istio comes with built-in support for Kiali dashboards for traffic and telemetry visualization; Jaeger for tracing; Prometheus and Grafana for observability. Rancher 2.3 also introduces support for Kubernetes v1.15.x and Docker 19.03.