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.
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
Modules in the initial stack
- Longhorn (beta) — distributed storage
- Ecosystem plugins for logging (Fluentd), monitoring (Prometheus), CI (Drone)
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 natural path is that SUSE Linux Enterprise + Rancher becomes a reference enterprise offering.
References: Rancher 2.0 (1 May 2018). Rancher Labs. Sheng Liang, Darren Shepherd. Apache 2.0 licence. Multi-cluster dashboard. K8s distributions: RKE, RKE2.