Rancher 2.0 container management platform | Hacker News Reader

Rancher 2.0 container management platform

rancher.com

84 pointsphren0logy39 comments

Will the new system still be able to schedule containers through the GUI with the same options as currently available on Cattle? I like Kubernetes but I much prefer having an easy way to change configuration via a GUI. Frankly I've found the existing Cattle scheduler far more pleasant to manage than Kubernetes, which feels like it requires a lot more time to manage effectively.

Also the one feature I'd really love to see from Rancher is ARM support for the agent. Not fussed about running the server on ARM but it'd be immensely useful for me if the agent could be.

EDIT: And is there a timeline for when a final version of 2.0 is expected? We're currently building our new deployment stack, and if 1.0 will be fazed out by the end of the year I'd rather start afresh now than later :)

> Will the new system still be able to schedule containers through the GUI with the same options as currently available on Cattle?

Yes!

> Also the one feature I'd really love to see from Rancher is ARM support for the agent

I've seen this running. I can look in to it.

Awesome!

And yeah I've found a few resources of people who've managed it. Last time I tried to compile it, it got stuck on some x86-specific dependencies in the base images you guys were using I think. A year later and I'm finally starting to look at it again. Official support would be fantastic if possible; I would very happily start using it on hundreds of devices in the near future :D

I soon will be working on this as a contribution. Starting with RancherOS’s kernel through, and adding GPU support. Please include me in your comms.

FYI some of the contributions related to ARM are mentioned in this issue: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/9751

Typo: PPC, not ARM.

Side note: What is the fascination with skinny font weights (100 in this case) for the entire body text? It's incredibly hard to read. Here's a screenshot of the page with the first 2 paragraphs in a normal style:

https://i.imgur.com/bdU8Mex.png

Thanks for the feedback

It's awesome that they're completely based on Kubernetes now -- super ready to switch over and start using it.

I'd love to hear what you think

I run a very small (1 node) Kubernetes cluster for my projects, and I was looking into Rancher when I was setting it up. At first I chose to go with just Kubernetes to make sure I understood the concepts. I've written about my adventures with kubernetes here on my blog (https://vadosware.io/post/fresh-dedicated-server-to-single-n...), and am in the middle of a ton of posts about what I did when I started using Kubernetes.

I just watched the demo, but I wasn't quite sure how Rancher would deal with specifying Kubernetes Ingresses and Kubernetes Deployments/Pods -- I assume they map the DNS tab and "stacks". Also, I see that you can upload a docker compose file, but I have quite a few kubernetes resource configurations that I'm using for everything right now, I assume you can just as easily upload a resource config? (from somewhere like the stack creation page/menu?)

I have an already running kubernetes cluster and I'm going to give Rancher a go tomorrow, if it's as easy as the demo has made it seem I'm going to be very pleased.

I've been been using Rancher for 6 months now and it has been a very smooth experience. They're incredibly careful with upgrades and their Release instructions are just a breeze to follow. I'm actually happy with Cattle but I understand Kubernetes won and we just have to accept it.

Thanks for the feedback. I'd really like to talk to you after you've tried it out. Let me know if you're open to it.

This is great. My only two issues with Rancher were related to the UI (it was a bit clunky) and Kubernetes being a second class citizen so it's good to see that these are the issues which were addressed in this release. I look forward to upgrading.

Happy to hear it. A lot of care went in to refreshing the UI and to get the integration experience with Kubernetes just right. I'd be delighted to hear how the experience goes for you when you try it out.

I tried this yesterday and my initial impression is that this is a streamlined solution and I want to dig in deeper.

One thing though, it is unclear how much RAM Rancher 2.0 requires.

http://rancher.com/rancher2-0/ states 2 GB, while the Getting Started Guide at http://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.0/en/quick-start-guide/ says minimum of 4 GB RAM.

The correct answer is 4GB.

@nickstinemates Is there any ETA for the release of 2.0? We'er running 1.x now and were seriously looking at dropping it for a straight Kubernetes cluster, but if 2.0 will be ready soon enough...

No hard date we can publicly commit to, yet. Would be happy to chat about your timeline and requirements and get a recommendation from the team. Let me know if interested.

Congratulations and thank you! It's not an easy choice to abandon self developed and very powerful Cattle orchestration in favor of k8s, but it was a right move!

The team did a good job integrating the simplicity of the cattle experience on top of Kubernetes. Part of the goal of the tech preview is to see if we've balanced the goal correctly.

Will you continue supporting mesos and swarm?

Will you continue using haproxy for load balancing, or there will be other choices also with GUI support? Any plans to implement similar approach for other massively used containers, like let's encrypt certs provisioning? It would be great to have custom forms for configs and env variables with input validation for parametrizable containers. (Not only for provisioning new stacks, but also while upgrading containers)

Will you continue supporting such a great projects, like aws efs and ebs, ecr authorization, rancher-cron, rancher network stack etc?

[Rancher employee] There has been comparatively minimal interest in Mesos/Swarm vs Cattle and K8s, but they will continue to be available as catalog items (not in the current preview).

The built in balancer is still HAProxy. Let's Encrypt integration is certainly a possibility but no immediate plans.

Volume support is not fully there in the current preview release, but all those projects will continue to be supported.

Anyone had experience running a cross vendor cloud setup with Rancher? How was the experience and were you able to reduce operating costs?

Using rancher cluster on 4 different hosts in different regions. Sometimes I face different problems with networking, but they are mostly fixed restarting the containers. Its just hard to detect or diagnose them in time. Integrated network state monitoring could be such a great feature for Rancher!

Thank you for the feedback, the networking issues are definitely on my radar.

I had no problem running a cross-cloud cluster with rancher 1.x. You simply have to make sure the IPSec ports are open between hosts for the overlay network.

So does this mean Cattle is dead in 2.0 and Kubernetes is the only orchestrator available?

That would be a shame because I decided to use Cattle because it seemed simpler and lighter that something like Kubernetes.

[Rancher employee] it essentially means the same Cattle experience (ui, api, compose files) as you used before, but under the hood kubernetes launches the containers.

Oh ok great! I was worried I'd have to get elbow deep into Kubernetes before upgrading

Thanks guys, you're doing awesome work

I dug around a bit, but didn't see anything definitive.

Does anybody know if Rancher 1.X or 2.0 support GPU instances? That's a must have feature for us.

Thanks!

Does docker need anything special for GPU instances? As far as I know, rancher 1.X simply interacts with the docker agent running on whatever hardware you provide (cloud or otherwise).

We use a variant of Docker https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker

Kubernetes version 1.7 (I believe) introduced native GPU support, in beta.

So there are some 'special' things that need to be done...though the gap seems to be getting more narrow.

I'm looking in to this.

Thank you kindly.

Here's what I've found out...

We have some customers who are using this configuration (including nvidia-docker) with some scheduling limitations.

That being said, we haven't expressly integrated this use case, so anything Kubernetes has done in 1.7 is available, but not completely surfaced/taken advantage of.

Ok that's sensible.

Any chance of some documentation/HOWTO on how that was done?

Thanks again!

Does it do blue-green deployments yet?

It's the main feature that attracts me to Deis.

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