Managing N Kubernetes clusters
Those who operate Kubernetes in enterprise end up with N clusters: on-prem, AWS EKS, Azure AKS, GKE, edge, dev, staging, prod. Managing them separately is a nightmare: repeated RBAC, different policies, fragmented visibility. A unified control plane is needed.
The release
Rancher 1.x (2014) is born as container management with Docker (proprietary Cattle orchestrator). Rancher 2.0 is a Kubernetes-first complete rewrite, released on 1 May 2018. Apache 2.0 licence. Lead: Sheng Liang (CEO), Darren Shepherd (CTO). Written in Go.
SUSE acquires Rancher Labs on 1 July 2020 for ~$600M.
Features
- Multi-cluster dashboard — single UI for all clusters
- Cluster provisioning — create clusters on cloud (EKS, AKS, GKE, DigitalOcean) or on-prem (vSphere, bare-metal)
- Cluster import — manage existing clusters
- Centralised RBAC — roles and permissions across all clusters, SSO with AD/LDAP/SAML/OIDC
- Projects — namespaces grouped by team
- App Catalog — Helm charts installable via UI
- Monitoring — integrated Prometheus/Grafana
- Logging — Fluent Bit + Grafana Loki
- CIS benchmark — security scanning
- Backup & restore — Velero integration
K8s distributions
Rancher manages clusters produced by:
- RKE — Rancher Kubernetes Engine (Docker-based)
- RKE2 — successor, containerd-based, hardened for govt/enterprise
- K3s — lightweight edge/IoT
- Upstream K8s (imported)
- EKS, AKS, GKE, DigitalOcean
Recent modules
- Fleet — GitOps multi-cluster scale
- Harvester — HCI (HyperConverged Infrastructure) on KubeVirt
- Elemental — OS management for edge
- Longhorn — distributed storage
- NeuVector — container security (acquired 2021)
- Opni — AIOps
Versions
- 2.0 (May 2018) — Kubernetes rewrite
- 2.5 (November 2020) — improved Cluster Explorer
- 2.6 (August 2021) — Vue 3 UI Shell
- 2.7 (November 2022) — Harvester integration
- 2.8 (December 2023) — embedded cluster support
- 2.9 (August 2024) — Kubernetes 1.30 support
In the Italian context
Rancher is very widespread in Italy among:
- MSPs — multi-client K8s management
- Enterprise companies with hybrid on-prem + cloud clusters
- Banks with data sovereignty requirements (SUSE + Rancher = EU stack)
- Digital PA — projects with regional multi-cluster
- Italian hardware suppliers proposing K8s appliances
- Hosting providers for K8s-as-a-Service
SUSE has a strong commercial presence in Italy, and the SUSE Linux Enterprise + Rancher combination is a reference enterprise offering.
References: Rancher 2.0 (1 May 2018). Rancher Labs (SUSE since 1 July 2020, ~$600M). Sheng Liang, Darren Shepherd. Apache 2.0 licence. Multi-cluster dashboard. K8s distributions: RKE, RKE2, K3s.