Developed by Rancher Labs and now from SUSE, Rancher is open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. Rancher centrally manages Kubernetes clusters across the organization in order to ensure security and accelerate transformation. Rancher is also available hosted. Hosted Rancher is a fully managed Rancher control plane - presented as the fastest, most cost-effective path to multi-cluster Kubernetes in an enterprise.
Learn about the best (and worst!) features SUSE Rancher has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 35 ratings of SUSE Rancher's features
Top Performing Features
8.7+6%
Container Orchestration
The product’s ability to automate networking, deployment, scaling, and other container management functions.
Category average: 8.2
8-6%
Security and Isolation
Product provides effective tools to isolate containers, nodes, and clusters and protect them from threats.
Category average: 8.5
8-4%
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging
Product provides tools to manage performance, health, and other data related to containers or clusters. This could include analytics tools, logging tools, live dashboards, etc.
Category average: 8.3
Areas for Improvement
7.1-10%
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks
Product provides tools or functionality to deliver updates to containerized applications in ways that minimize the impact of errors, and revert updates that cause problems.
Category average: 7.9
6.7-18%
Storage Management
Product’s ability to allocate storage resources and manage both temporary and persistent data.
Category average: 8.2
6.5-21%
Discovery Tools
Product provides methods (such as URIs or sortable lists) to easily find and access jobs, nodes, containers, or clusters.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
Simplifies K8
Easy to use UI
Offers a CLI
Cons
Upgrades are slow
Lack of standards
UI can be glitchy/slow
Return on Investment
Increased workload uptime by 17%
Increased automation efficiency
Quicker dev onboarding
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Kubernetes
Other Software Used
Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Postman, Amazon Bedrock, AWS Organizations
DevOps Architect for Containerization Platforms and Microservices in Information Technology at PZU (10,001+ employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
Public and private cloud infrastructure providers based on K8s CAPI
REST API that can be used to integrate company services with Rancher
GUI that is easy to learn and use in daily operations
Builtin GitOps automation solution based on Fleet project
It is fully open source
Cons
Airgap installations can be hard and demanding
Still waiting for Project 2.0 feature with support of hierarchical Namespaces
Speed of development of new functionalites is uneven
Return on Investment
Shortens "Time-to-Market" factor for new business applications or implementing new functionalities. From 1 to 50 microservices-based business applications in 6 years.
24/7 availability, generates more money. There are many infrastructure components that are regularly powered-off for maintenance or upgrade, bur we rarely are turning off our downstream Kubernetes clusters where our business applications lives.
Single Point of Contact with platform maintenance and development Team, eases implementation of new business applications
Senior Software Engineer in Information Technology at Web Bakers (11-50 employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Infra Architect in Information Technology at Cognizant (10,001+ employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
Easy to Mange Kubernetes cluster Using Suse Rancher GUI
No need to know all type of Kubernetes command while using Suse Rancher GUI
Easy to upgrade the Kubernetes Version
Cons
Some more features need to add in Kubernetes cluster configuration
Support should be improved
Production documentation should be more user friendly
Return on Investment
Suse Rancher has the positive impact as far as the ROI concerns
It has very significant impact in the business so far
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Managing Director in Corporate at Datalounges Oy (1-10 employees employees)
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
Manages users and access.
Maintains Kubernetes configurations.
Provides admin visibility to cluster health.
Cons
Self-service of developers needs either tooling or improvement
The observability-like elastic component is not flexible to fit into the rest of the stack
Fleet GitOps functionality could use improvement to compete with leading vendors
Return on Investment
Kept customer's costs in control for cloud native workloads.
Allowed for faster delivery of updates and upgrades.
Better visibility into the health of Kubernetes capacity.
