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Comment by nikon | Hacker News Reader

Why does Rancher[0] never get mentioned on here? I've been using it the last few months and it's been great. It handles everything for you without the huge learning curve.

I'm using Gitlab.com pipelines also and it means my CI/CD pipeline is now free, and once by build/tests are run it pings the Rancher API to upgrade the service.

[0] http://rancher.com/rancher/

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I was using rancher, but it is seriously memory hungry (mine seemed to need 2G) so you would need a $20 Digital Ocean box just to run rancher. Also, the agents / monitoring rancher uses was eating quite a lot of memory / CPU on each host.

It looks quite interesting.

Though the requirements for a multi-server setups are quite large IMO.

We have been using Rancher as well... It allowed us to move away from DO and AWS. Now most of our infra is from OVH :).

It's been smooth sailing.

Because of massive costs savings we were able to just reinvest it in our own redundancy. Also 12-factor apps are pretty damn resilient.

That's cool. I've actually just moved from ESXI hosts to OVH too.

How are you handling persistent storage? I have opted to not "dockerize" Postgres for example after reading horror stories.

Which kind of setup do you have i OVH? do you rent servers or VMs? Do you deploy docker? via kubernets or what? quite interested in this, if you have material/links on OVH and docker/kube I would not mind if you can share.

As above, I have VMs on OVH public cloud[0]. Rancher can also offers an OpenStack driver which is what OVH Public Cloud runs on, but I have not yet tried that.

I've found certain things quite buggy with their cloud offering but the price/performance can't be argued with.

[0] https://www.ovh.co.uk/cloud/instances/

OVH don't expose OpenStack APIs so don't expect that to work.

I have used the nova command line tool to manage some instances, is that not using the OpenStack APIs?

We currently just rent a few big boxes on OVH, and manage them via Rancher.

You should checkout ranchers channel for some videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh5Xtp82q8wjijP8npkVTBA

It's mind-blowing that they offer this for free, considering the impact it has.

could you talk about whats your underlying platform? are you using k8s or mesos or something.

k8s currently has incomplete support for metal deployments. for example the integration between ingress and load balancers on metal vs cloud.

im kind of wondering how people are deploying them in real life.

secondly, how do you deploy new code?

Because theres no perfect solution at the moment we have opted for a 4 disk setup, and mirror them all using ZFS. We also do 10 minute snapshots, and incremental snapshot backups (to S3).

Feels safe enough for our needs. Before this we didn't have 10 minute snapshots of all our data so this has actually allowed us to recover from dev errors as well (if they were to happen).

We do have our DB running in a container + mounted volumes that use the above configuration.

Rancher is great. I am curious what was it about Rancher specifically that allowed you to move away from DO? I found that intriguing, can you elaborate?

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