Rancher Deep Dive

Effectively build, manage, and secure your Kubernetes workloads to implement CI/CD

Key Features

• Gain a complete understanding of how Rancher works
• Discover how to design and deploy Kubernetes clusters using Rancher
• Understand how to extend Kubernetes and Rancher’s capabilities to take your apps to the next level

Book Description

Knowing how to use Rancher enables you to manage multiple clusters and applications without being locked into a vendor’s platform. This book will guide you through Rancher’s capabilities while deepening your understanding of Kubernetes and helping you to take your applications to a new level.

The book begins by introducing you to Rancher and Kubernetes, helping you to learn and implement best practices. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll understand the strengths and limitations of Rancher and Kubernetes and discover all the different ways to deploy Rancher. You’ll also find out how to design and deploy Kubernetes clusters to match your requirements. The concluding chapters will show you how to set up a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for deploying applications into a Rancher cluster, along with covering supporting services such as image registries and Helm charts.

By the end of this Kubernetes book, you’ll be able to confidently deploy your mission-critical production workloads on Rancher-managed Kubernetes clusters.

What you will learn

• Deploy Rancher in a production-ready configuration
• Architect an application cluster to support mission-critical workloads
• Build the type of Kubernetes cluster that makes sense for your environment
• Discover the tools and services needed to make a new, ready-to-deploy cluster
• Prepare your applications to be deployed into Rancher for Kubernetes
• Expand your Kubernetes cluster by providing additional services such as Longhorn, OPA, and monitoring

Who this book is for

This book is for DevOps engineers looking to deploy Kubernetes in a fast and easy way. A basic understanding of Linux administration and containerization is needed to get the most out of this book.

Table of Contents

1. An Introduction to Rancher and Kubernetes
2. Rancher and Kubernetes High-Level Architecture
3. Creating a Single Node Rancher
4. Creating an RKE and RKE2 Cluster
5. Deploying Rancher on a Hosted Kubernetes Cluster
6. Creating an RKE Cluster Using Rancher
7. Deploying a Hosted Cluster with Rancher
8. Importing an Externally Managed Cluster into Rancher
9. Cluster Configuration Backup and Recovery
10. Monitoring and Logging
11. Bringing Storage to Kubernetes Using Longhorn
12. Security and Compliance Using OPA Gatekeeper
13. Scaling in Kubernetes
14. Load Balancer Configuration and SSL Certificates
15. Rancher and Kubernetes Troubleshooting
16. Setting Up a CI/CD Pipeline and Image Registry
17. Creating and Using Helm Charts
18. Resource Management

About the Author

Since 2019, Matthew Mattox has served as a SUSE principal support engineer, providing client-focused support. Having experience in both engineering and DevOps, Matthew has a deep understanding of Kubernetes, Docker, Rancher, Longhorn, and the OPA Gatekeeper. Apart from designing custom solutions to solve changing problems, he was named “Bullfighter of the Year” for his outstanding work at Rancher Labs. One of his primary goals is to make IT a profit center within your company, not a cost center.