Kubernetes vs Rancher: Choosing the Right Containerization
Introduction
What is Kubernetes?
Features of Kubernetes
What is a Rancher?
Features of Rancher
Key Comparison: Kubernetes vs Rancher
Kubernetes vs Rancher: Not competitive but Complimentary
Conclusion
Introduction
In today’s advanced app development ecosystem, software development companies prefer to use the latest technologies like Kubernetes and Rancher. Both these technologies are open-source and help in working with containers. But they aren’t alternative solutions. For container orchestration, companies can use Kubernetes and to manage Kubernetes clusters in an application, Rancher can be used.
To know more about Kubernetes vs Rancher and see why & when companies use both of them, let’s go through this blog.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes, an open-source solution, is known as the leader in container orchestration. It enables software development teams the flexibility that is required to efficiently run workloads that are containerized across various hybrid and cloud environments. Besides this, it offers advanced scaling and scheduling capabilities that ensure the application’s performance as it also helps in managing the resources of the Kubernetes app.
Features of Kubernetes
Here are some of the most popular Kubernetes features to streamline your software development process-
Enables easy application scaling
With the help of Kubernetes’ containers, the development teams can easily scale apps. It enables automating the service scaling processes and resources with the help of pod autoscaler and cluster autoscaler. Here, the auto-scaling functionality means that the application developers and cluster administrators can dynamically respond to the application traffic spikes by carrying out the application scaling process vertically or horizontally.
Cloud provider-agnostic
Generally, the development companies can run Kubernetes clusters on-premises, but to make it more efficient, companies also prefer to use the hosted Kubernetes platforms like Amazon EKA, Google Cloud’s GKE, and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes service. These services help in securing the operations and reducing costs. Being an open source and platform agnostic, Kubernetes makes it easy for developers to migrate the application between cloud providers.
Resource usage optimization
Kubernetes offers ways to assign pods to cluster nodes efficiently. In Kubernetes, the administrators can schedule the pods to the node’s location, other pods, or hardware performance. Kubernetes also helps in making hosting platforms more effective and efficient for users.
Environment consistency
When working on Kubernetes, developers can get environment consistency. Containers in Kubernetes help reduce environmental issues and also ensure that application environments are consistent in the entire app development process. Kubernetes also offers consistency in servers located on-premises and on the cloud. Besides, some tools can help in environmental consistency.
Self-healing
Kubernetes is a solution that is designed to be highly resilient to the failures of both node and pod. It gives support for geo-distribution with the help of pod scheduling on virtual machines in different physical and cloud data centers.
What is a Rancher?
Rancher is a platform that is designed to help developers operating multiple Kubernetes clusters. This means that with the help of Rancher, the developers can easily manage Kubernetes clusters in both small and large environments. It also comes with different ways to manage the Kubernetes cluster environments. For instance, Rancher can be used to simplify operations like centralized security management, monitoring workloads, and cluster provisioning. It also offers apps like Prometheus, Kubecost, Grafana, and more for the management of Kubernetes clusters.
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Features of Rancher
Here are some of the most popular Rancher features to look into-
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The Concept of Projects
Generally, applications are complex because of the business architecture and the most difficult aspect of this is a namespace. A group of cluster resources are known as Namespaces. These namespaces are assigned to separate teams and they have to independently administrate the namespaces. To help in this process, Rancher offers a construct called “projects” which is above the traditional namespaces offered by Kubernetes.
Projects help development companies to group namespaces together and offer a single point of control. On these projects, cluster admins can apply role-based access control (RBAC) to handle namespaces.
Cluster Provisioning and Import
With the help of Rancher, the developers can provision Kubernetes clusters on their chosen cloud provider by using a single console. While using Rancher, there is no need to switch between Azure consoles, GCP, and AWS. If any application has an existing cluster and wants Rancher to manage multiple clusters, that app can opt for it. Besides this, Rancher also offers a provisional named RKE (Rancher Kubernetes Engine).
Extended RBAC control
The majority of the app development teams run more than one Kubernetes cluster in production. This distribution means that one application can span more clusters which can be each hosted on different private and public clouds. The Ranchers also help in extending the RBAC controls of any project across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
Monitoring and alerting
With the help of Rancher, developers can easily monitor, log, and alert the cluster of any application. Monitoring and alerting can be carried out by tools like Alertmanager and Prometheus. These tools offer functionality like dashboards which can help in adding members to the application with ease. Besides this, Rancher also enables ship cluster logging to different logging providers.
Easy workload deployment
Rancher UI offers easy deployment of workloads on the separate Kubernetes clusters. It offers various options to configure the YAML template and have the application up & running.
Key Comparison: Kubernetes vs Rancher
Here are some points of comparison between Kubernetes vs Rancher.
1. Functionality and Scope
Kubernetes: Kubernetes is a popular open-source container that is used by developers to plan and coordinate development tasks like scaling, maintaining, and deploying. All this can be carried out across node clusters on both physical or virtual machines.
Rancher: Rancher is also an open-source platform. It helps in extending the functionalities of Kubernetes. This can be done with the services and tools that Rancher has to offer along with security policies.
2. Ease of Use and Setup
Kubernetes: While working with Kubernetes, sometimes developers may face issues in setting it up and managing it. And as it requires manual configuration, developers need to have enough knowledge about it.
Rancher: On the other hand, when it comes to Rancher, it is a simple tool that doesn’t require a complex setup process. It comes with a user-friendly interface that comes with alerting, monitoring, and logging functionalities.
3. Manage Multiple Kubernetes Clusters
Kubernetes: Cluster management is one of the most efficient features of Kubernetes.
Rancher: With Rancher, managing the Kubernetes cluster is easy as it offers a unified interface for it.
4. Extensibility and Integration
Kubernetes: Kubernetes offers support for plugins and extensions that can customize and integrate different environments with other services.
Rancher: Rancher offers some popular tools like Grafana, Prometheus, and Istio that offer additional services than Kubernetes. Besides, this platform also enables integration with different cloud providers, CI/CD pipelines, and more.
Kubernetes and Rancher- They Compliment Each-other
Kubernetes and Rancher are the platforms that can be used by app development companies to create a cloud-native infrastructure. Both these technologies offer advanced functionalities and have some common comparison points but they are not competitive rather they complement each other. This means that each of these technologies offers significance to each other’s approaches. For instance, Kubernetes works best for container orchestration under a physical or virtual cluster management process. While Rancher focuses on managing the Kubernetes cluster.
This is how Rancher with Kubernetes works.
Conclusion
As seen in this blog, Kubernetes is a popular platform for container orchestration. Because of this companies are rapidly adopting this platform which sometimes challenges teams in managing more clusters. For this, Rancher is used by companies as it helps in managing multiple Kubernetes clusters and simplifying the management process for the developers. This shows that both these platforms complement each other. So when they are used together, they can offer wonders.
Meta: Kubernetes helps in managing containers under a cluster of physical or virtual machines and Rancher helps in managing Kubernetes clusters. Let’s explore more.
