Experience with Rancher

Simple and Fast with Cattle of Rancher

Our Rancher Cattle in his Best Form

Prolog

I write this article since someone asked me my experience with Rancher. We used Rancher in the time before we could use a managed Kubernetes (K8s) from the cloud providers and before SuSe bought it.

We had on-premise server landscape and we didn’t see that we could lower our costs by using cloud providers.

We were only a few developers and we didn’t want to do too much operations. Our expectations were:

• Automatic restart of web apps
• Adding new instance of web apps in case we had more activities
• Reinstall and deploy web apps without having a downtime

So we tried Rancher. It still had its own distributed protocol similar to K8s, which called Cattle. It is a lot more simpler than K8s but it fulfilled our requirements above.

Using Rancher

The installation was very straightforward. The documentation was superb. Adding servers to the cluster was also very easy. Just add an agent on the server and let it managed from the master…