Container management software company Rancher Labs Inc. today added an important new capability to its platform, providing support for “multicluster” Kubernetes applications for the first time.

The company said it’s the first platform of its kind to add the new capability, which delivers enhanced reliability and availability for applications deployed on multiple clusters and edge computing environments.

Rancher Labs sells a container operating system that makes it easier to deploy software containers at scale. Software containers are used by developers to build applications that can run on any platform. The company also offers a management platform for Kubernetes, which is the most popular software for orchestrating container deployments.

Computer clusters are a group of loosely or tightly connected computers that work together as a single system. With modern containerized applications, organizations often find they need to deploy these on multiple clusters in order to ensure their high availability. It’s an effective solution, but Rancher Labs said doing so isn’t foolproof because applications can still go offline if a single cluster fails.

The company said that historically, multiclusters are created by pulling nodes from other availability zones into the same cluster. But if the cluster failed, the application would still become unavailable.

By supporting multicluster apps, Rancher Labs said, it can sidestep these problems as it enables users to select each application and their target clusters, and provide specific data for each one. Deployment is performed automatically through selection from the Rancher Application Catalog.

“Enterprises need to deploy next generation applications as fast as possible, and so they’re looking for any help they can get to make the management of Kubernetes easier,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “This is the opportunity for vendors like Rancher Labs, which has focused on simplifying the management of multi-cluster apps on Kubernetes.”

Rancher Labs said multicluster support is currently being tested in its 2.2.0 alpha release and will be included in Rancher 2.2 when it’s released later this year.

Image: Rancher Labs/Facebook