Item: SUSE Rancher
Rating: 9
Author: Marcello Teodori

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Unified kubectl Authentication with SSO across clouds
rancher CLI for developers and integration in CI/CD
Easy web UI to access pod logs and modify images used

Deeper integration with Kubernetes Cluster API to allow upgrading clusters
Integration with Rancher Desktop to promote workloads

Most Important Features

SSO Integration for Cluster Management and kubectl

Return on Investment

Made much easier adopting Kubernetes in development
Full visibility of CI/CD environment status to developers for self service troubleshooting

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Web Services

As we use only AWS EKS Clusters originally we were using the AWS Console and CLI but that is too limited in scope. Also, we were using AWS IAM roles to provide access to users but that was lots of extra work to have them integrated into SSO while on Rancher we have just connected our GitHub login with the Alfresco organization and that uses, in turn, Okta for SSO so provisioning for access is automatic for any developer who has been assigned to GitHub.

Key Insights

Do you think SUSE Rancher delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SUSE Rancher's feature set?

Yes

Did SUSE Rancher live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SUSE Rancher go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SUSE Rancher again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Slack, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Jira Software

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Users and Roles

100 - Developers and Product Managers

Support Headcount Required

4 - DevOps Engineer

Using Rancher as Kubernetes Dashboard and Cluster Management for Developers

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with SUSE Rancher