SUSE Rancher

SUSE Rancher handles Kubernetes cluster management challenges by offering consistent reliability and enhanced DevOps efficiency. It simplifies adoption with a unified interface for developers and real-time business insights. Use cases span general IT operations, infrastructure reliability, and simplified automation. However, evaluating the investment should account for staff expertise and project priorities. We offer it as an alternative to the cloud.

Well-Suited Scenarios:
Multicloud/Multitenant Deployments: SUSE Rancher excels in managing Kubernetes clusters across multiple providers. It provides a consistent experience across all tenants.
Prod Workloads: Organizations use SUSE Rancher to run Kubernetes production workloads. The interface simplifies management and devs don’t need to be familiar with kubectl or K8 in general.

Less Appropriate Scenarios:
Limited Staff Expertise: If your team lacks K8 expertise, the complexity of managing clusters might be difficult.
Minimal/Small Infrastructure: If you have minimal infrastructure SUSE Rancher’s benefits may not be fully unlocked.

We use SUSE Rancher within our organisation to orchestrate Docker containers across a number of micro services. SUSE Rancher is great for managing connectivity between different components, and connecting multiple nodes together running these services. We have been using SUSE Rancher since v1 to run 100s of containers and workloads, from dev, test to production environments.

SUSE Rancher is great for quickly deploying containerised workloads, version 2 of SUSE Rancher branched deeper into the Kubernetes ecosystem which has made the tool more powerful, with the slight drawback of increased learning curve for those less familiar with K8s. SUSE Rancher comes into its own when running a number of workloads and nodes and may be less suited to running more monolithic workloads.

We are using Rancher at corporate scale: multiple cluster, tens of projects, 300 Namespaces, 500 applications developers and administrators, thousands of Business users and clients etc. Rancher is used to maintain multiple very similar to each other Kubernetes clusters, within two main environments (non-production and production).Time not consumed by repetetive Day-2 operations, we can spent on developing new functionalites of our Rancher-based platforms. Most important ROI for Business is single platform for all business applications that are built as microservices. That provides shorter time-to-market factor, and SPoC and SPoK (K as Knowledge) for applications developers.

Rancher best suits for installation at scale. There is no difference if you need a few very large clusters, or dozens or hundreds of tiny one. It helps to simplify repetetive Day-2 operations and maintenance or administrative tasks.In other hand Rancher is easy to install and hard to master. Learning by doing in Rancher is effective and very interesting, but takes a lot of time, so in small and simple environments it will not generate high ROI.

We use SUSE Rancher as our central tool for orchestrating our Kubernetes landscape to enable standarization, governance, lifecycle managment and visibility.
By using SUSE Rancher we will get support for our Kubernetes landscape, which is no possible by just using open source, and reduce the complexitiy of setting up Kubernetes clusters.
We started with on-premise and extended to AWS EKS and plan to also add Azure AKS in future.

Rancher is perfect if you have to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters, especially if you have to provide them for different teams with their own access rights and requirements. With Rancher we can provide such clusters on-premise, even in different sites, and in the cloud on different hyperscalers.
If you only have to manage one or some few Kubernetes clusters, it would surely be too much overhead to use Rancher.

We need to run our Kubernetes-Clusters in an Air-Gapped environment and need the opportunity to manage all these clusters and also append new ones in short time.

Originally we came from SUSE CaaSP and were "forced" into Rancher. In retrospect, this was a good decision, Rancher comes with everything we need and - if we exclude the last releases (e.g. 2.7.5) - it's pretty stable too. With the fleet integration, we can pretty much deploy a new cluster with all managed services we provide we just a few clicks.

We work with multiple clients and by the time we have multiple cluster hosted on multiple cloud platforms. It's very difficult to manage all those cluster manually or through cli tools. With Rancher we can easily create, upgrade and delete clusters in almost all the major cloud platform. One of the major issue was managing users and monitoring the cluster, Rancher helps us in that as well.

I will highly recommend Rancher to companies or individuals working on multiple Kubernetes clusters. Rancher will help in easily creating and upgrading the clusters. you can easily setup production grade monitoring by just one click with Prometheus and Grafana. You can also create users with fine grain permissions to protect your cluster from un-authorised access.

I am using Suse Rancher to manage Kubernetes system. This has a good Graphical user interface to Manage the Kubernetes Cluster. We are using the cloud environment for our Kubernetes configuration. It is good to have Rancher product which are easy to manage the Kubernetes solution. We have some web base application hosted on Kubernetes cluster & this is managed by Suse Rancher.

In case of Container management, It is recommended to use Suse Rancher. It is good to use this in cloud environment. It is easy to manage there. It is not recommended to use in the on-premises environment. We have mnay limited use cases for the on-premises environment for Suse Rancher.

We use SUSE Rancher to run Kubernetes production workloads.
We chose Rancher because:
+) It's easy to manage users and their permissions.
+) It's the most complete Kubernetes GUI on the market.
+) Developers don't need to know kubectl cli and Kubernetes YAML syntax to start deploying workblows.
+) It's very easy to upgrade Kubernetes versions with just a few mouse clicks.

SUSE Rancher is well suited if you want a stable system to start fast Kubernetes adoption. You can learn a long time, you don't need to be a Kubernetes expert in the beginning. I would like to be able to backup Rancher namespaces and projects. Now it's possible to backup only whole clusters.

We needed a web dashboard software for our AWS EKS development clusters on Kubernetes with granular user access connected to our SSO and as we had been using in the past Rancher 1 successfully in pre-Kubernetes days it was good to investigate the new Rancher completely built for Kubernetes. The tool is invaluable and the user interface is so easy that also our more technically minded Product Managers can use it. It also unifies authentication for command-line access for kubectl and provides its own command-line tool for developers who prefer not to use the web interface.

When managing multiple development clusters it's extremely useful, especially with multiple cloud providers. We haven't used it for cloud production workloads yet where security assessment to match certifications is required and cloud operations should assess if they find it as useful as developers do.

Customers of Datalounges build, maintain and manage cloud native applications on a variety of Kubernetes platforms. Often these are provided by hyper scalers such as Google and AmazonWeb Services. A small environment is easy for customers to keep under control, but as the use cases start varying and requirements for security, configuration management and more common ops-related problems arise, SUSE Rancher is introduced to the equation to maintain those platforms. Key use cases may include controlled delivery of apps from a trusted source and then their lifecycle or controlling the configurations of the Kubernetes environments to keep them similar enough over their lifecycle. Mainly it is a scaling thing though. Rancher provides a good basis for skilled engineers to automate and those with less experience to administrate in scale.

SUSE Rancher as a management tool becomes useful on a larger scale. Small deployments not so much. If someone also requires Kubernetes capacity or storage, Rancher is an excellent choice. Also, without Kubernetes' skills, it is unlikely that Rancher deployment is going to be a success. Then again if someone else is managing your Kubernetes capacity, setting up the software's capacity will yield greater control. Rancher is not a very integrated solution similar to others in the market.