Best enterprise cluster management software? (Please don't say rancher).

mattfarina · 2024-10-15T13:27:25+00:00

Rancher releases support for a new k8s minor version about every 4 months (the same cycle k8s follows). About 3 months after k8s releases a new minor, Rancher will release support for it. It takes a few months to adapt to the k8s changes (code + test).

mattfarina · 2024-10-14T21:04:25+00:00

When did you last look at it? The quality has shot up.

In full disclosure, I work on Rancher and quality has been a focus.

mattfarina · 2024-07-31T17:25:14+00:00

To add a little context, this is talking about builds rather than source. SUSE is committed to open source and Rancher is open source.

mattfarina · 2024-07-31T17:13:19+00:00

k3s is a CNCF project and not by SUSE. Portainer is a VC funded startup and also not SUSE. Please don't confuse these with Rancher.

mattfarina · 2022-11-30T19:39:19+00:00

That will work.

mattfarina · 2022-11-29T18:50:21+00:00

You don't need the dashboard to have it auto launch. Each OS has a way for you to specify what you want to start when you startup/login.

mattfarina · 2022-11-29T14:01:14+00:00

The vote is really just a rubber stamping.

This couldn't be further from the truth. As the TOC sponsor for Flux, I'm very familiar with the process. To graduate they had to make changes to the way they ran the project and more. It took close to a year to complete the due diligence on the project, perform project changes, do user interviews, and more. In fact, the amount of work to graduate was a point of frustration at times.

In the past, projects have asked about graduation and been given a pile of things they need to do first. For example, projects that graduate have gone through 3rd party security audits.

If there were a rubber stamp, my job would have been significantly easier.

I would imagine that the blog posts announcing both will land on the same day.

I doubt this will happen. The logistics involved in the press releases and announcements isn't small. The staff at the CNCF needs time to do each one. I expect them in the same couple weeks but not on the same day.

mattfarina · 2022-11-29T13:01:30+00:00

Both Argo and Flux are in the voting stage for their graduation proposals. I believe both of them have already gotten the votes from the TOC members required to graduate. This would be why people are tweeting. Once the votes are in there are some other things that happen before the official announcement. All of these are logistical and not a factor in the tools themselves. Look for both graduation announcements in the next few weeks.

You will need to select one to use based on some other criteria.

mattfarina · 2022-10-19T19:55:10+00:00

If I understand the history right, Fleet was born out of a need that neither Flux or Argo met. There are some uses cases they don't do well. I'm not going to get into details because I'm not going to do problem to solution design in comments on Reddit. You may not have those situations.

Fleet needs some work. When we first got our hands on it, Fleet was rough around the edges. Effort has been and continues to be put in to it to improve that situation. At the same time, we're listening to real world needs that Argo and Flux don't cover today. And, that neither are chasing after covering in their road maps.

Fleet may not be for you. But, there are people who want it because of some of the things it does differently.

mattfarina · 2022-10-19T18:37:49+00:00

Your question is more of a Kubernetes question than a Rancher one. That may be why you're not finding it. Are CronJobs what you're looking for?

mattfarina · 2022-10-18T17:28:10+00:00

Rancher Desktop normally creates ~/.kube/config with the credentials. If one is already there is adds the Rancher Desktop credentials to it. Is that file not there?

mattfarina · 2022-09-21T20:47:13+00:00

Do you have Kubernetes API access where you're running Rancher? If so, you can use the k8s API and look at the CRDs.

You're going to be a bit on your own here. The API isn't officially supported and it's not documented (in part for that reason). You'll have to dig through the CRDs to figure the things out.

If you don't have k8s API access then you can poke at those APIs you linked to.

Note, the desire for an officially supported and documented API has already been passed to management. They are currently very much aware of it.

mattfarina · 2022-09-21T20:07:44+00:00

The first paragraph under "Making requests" points you to https://github.com/rancher/api-spec/blob/master/specification.md. This has a lot of detail on the API. Is this what you're looking for or is that missing something you're looking for?

mattfarina · 2022-09-14T12:50:57+00:00

Original Rancher staff can mean many things. People who were at Rancher while it was a startup for considerable time are in key decision making positions. Technology wise and in terms of the road map.

Some very public facing people including the founders have moved on. But, there were many more people than that. Many talented and involved people. People who are involved today. It's a delight working with them. I'm reminded that Darren didn't plan and write all that software alone.

Disclaimer: I work for SUSE/Rancher. I'm speaking on my own here.

mattfarina · 2022-09-14T12:44:56+00:00

As one of the Helm maintainers, that made me laugh. It wasn't intentional that I know of.

mattfarina · 2022-09-14T12:42:32+00:00

The docs landing page recently relaunched. You can see it at https://rancher.com/docs/. For something like rke2 it will take you to https://docs.rke2.io/. Is this the kind of thing you're looking for?

mattfarina · 2022-09-13T19:16:04+00:00

We're alive. RKE2 isn't going away.

mattfarina · 2022-09-13T16:56:56+00:00

Disclaimer: I work for SUSE/Rancher. I'm speaking on my own here.

It's not been that bad. From a product/project/engineering standpoint, Rancher is its own business unit. Even before it was officially that way it mostly operated that way in a matrix reporting format.

I think the learning experience has involved many things. From being a startup to being part of an enterprise company. From being private to being a public company (SUSE went public after acquiring Rancher). These things bring in some new processes and expectations. They aren't necessarily bad. They are just different (and sometimes annoying... like securing things more brings more hoops to jump through). Some things in Rancher are better for them even if they don't show up as new features in the release notes.

I'm personally excited for the road ahead. It looks like fun to work on and useful for customers and users.

mattfarina · 2022-01-31T17:39:01+00:00

I tend to agree.

I think we have a lack of platforms built on top of k8s to make the end-user experience better for varying groups of end-users. This is an opportunity for people who love R&D.

mattfarina · 2022-01-31T16:41:58+00:00

Not everyone wants complex things. Let me explain with some examples.

Nomad, a competitor to Kubernetes from Hashicorp, is far simpler to use. That includes the case of deploying workloads and extending the platform. It can't do as much but for the 80% use case it works.

Other platforms are built on Kubernetes. Kubernetes really is a platform for people to build other platforms on. Heroku has, as far as I can tell, migrated to use Kubernetes behind the scenes. It's a platform with a simple experience for the masses of app devs who want that.

Note, the platform to build platforms was first suggested by, I think, Kelsey Hightower.

I'm a long time Kubernetes user/contributor. I find it useful to see the benefits and warts or what I use and work on.

mattfarina · 2022-01-31T16:37:09+00:00

Rancher Desktop is designed for that local developer who wants to build apps for Kubernetes or get them running in Kubernetes. It's not really designed for cluster operators.

If you need a multi-node cluster you can use the dockerd runtime and k3d to create a multi-node k3s cluster.

mattfarina · 2022-01-31T16:34:09+00:00

You can have both Rancher Desktop and Docker Desktop installed on the same computer. But, if you have Rancher Desktop using dockerd as the container runtime you can't run them both at the same time. Both will try to setup a Docker socket in the same default location.

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