Container software company Rancher Labs Inc. launched a major update to its Kubernetes management platform today.

In particular, it added an easier installation experience and new capabilities such as GitOps at scale for edge clusters, as well as full lifecycle management of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters.

The company’s Rancher platform is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that’s based on the open-source K3s distribution that its founders created. Rancher was built to address the need to run small clusters of software containers that run on x86, Arm64 and Armv7 processors in edge computing environments.

Software containers are used to host the components of modern applications that can run on any kind of computing infrastructure without making changes to its underlying code. Kubernetes is the most popular tool for managing clusters of those containers.

Rancher Labs says full Kubernetes distributions are too complex and memory-intensive to run at the edge, where data is processed onsite rather than at remote data centers. The Rancher platform is basically a stripped-down version of Kubernetes that removes many of its nonessential parts, including old application programming interface groups, nondefault admission controllers and storage drivers.

Users can still add any parts they need, but they’re not included by default. The distribution also minimizes memory usage by consolidating the processes that run on Kubernetes servers into a single one.

The open-source K3s has proved to be a big hit, with more than 1 million downloads by the time Rancher Labs handed over control of the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in August.

Rancher Labs, which was recently acquired by SUSE Group, said the Rancher 2.5 release introduces a more streamlined installation experience that enables it to be installed on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster, thereby eliminating the need to set up a separate cluster beforehand.

Rancher Labs Chief Executive Sheng Liang (pictured) told SiliconANGLE in an interview that this new installation process will be most helpful for companies that already use a cloud-based Kubernetes service such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Amazon EKS.

“Now Rancher is a simple add-on to any Kubernetes cluster from anyone, such as AWS, VMware, Digital Ocean or OpenShift,” he said. “It basically eliminates a layer.”

In addition to the easier installation process, Rancher also gets a new cluster dashboard that enables developers and operations teams to check the performance of each individual cluster they’re running, and new application monitoring and logging tools that should help them identify performance bottlenecks and resolve issues faster.

The new release also enables GitOps at large scale for edge clusters. For the uninitiated, GitOps is basically a set of best practices for developers using software containers that involves using a version control system such as GitHub to house all of the information, documentation and code for their Kubernetes deployments. GitOps provides a way for developers to manage operational workflows using Git, meaning they can use the tools they’re most familiar with to push code into production, resulting in increased productivity.

Rancher Labs said it’s vital to enable GitOps at scale becausecompanies these days are deploying applications across thousands of clusters in edge locations these days, at remote branch offices, retail stores, factories and more.

“We’ve pushed multicluster management to the next level,” Liang said. “We’re working with retailers with 5,000 branch stores and each one has a little K3s cluster running and they need to manage all of them.”

The release also adds full lifecycle management for Amazon EKS clusters. What this means is that Rancher gains access to EKS capabilities such as node groups and rolling upgrades. In addition, companies using the Amazon EKS service gain access to additional capabilities from Rancher, including advanced observability, Center for Internet Security benchmarking, push-button Istio service mesh, integrated OPA Gatekeeper and simplified autoscaling.

“Amazon EKS is the most popular way enterprises use Kubernetes today,” Liang said. “Rancher has always been able to manage EKS clusters, but EKS exposes a very rich set of management capabilities, so Rancher as a management system needs to evolve to full lifecycle management.”

So now, he said, Rancher users have full access to EKS’ built-in capabilities. Rancher can also get out of the way when users want to use native EKS management capabilities.

The latest release also caters to the specialized requirements of government agencies and the military, with the launch of RKE Goverment. Liang said this is a Federal Information Processing Standards-enabled and CNCF-certified version of the Rancher platform that comes with hardened security for public-sector applications.

Liang appeared in July on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio, where he discussed the company’s recent acquisition by SUSE and its role in the wider Kubernetes ecosystem:

Photo: SiliconANGLE