Item: SUSE Rancher
Rating: 10
Author: Szymon Madej

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 and Cons

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

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

Alternatives Considered

Longhorn Block Storage, SUSE NeuVector, SUSE Harvester and K3s Lightweight Kubernetes

That is the one of the greatest values of Rancher. You can choose to add new features and functionalities to your environment by implementing other projects from SUSE, but you not forced to. You can use Longhorn as Persistent Storage, but you can use any other i.e. VMware CSI, MINIO and many other. Rancher provides all security features that vanilla Kubernetes have, but if you want more, you want zero-trust then you implement NeuVector and KubeWarden. You can use SUSE Harvester as you infrastructure provider, but you can use another i.e. we are integrated with VMWare vSphere, tried working with Azure Kubernetes Services and willing to try OpenStack. You can even opt-out builtin GitOps based on Fleet, and use ArgoCD, Flux or any other such solution.

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

Ubuntu, Longhorn Block Storage, SUSE NeuVector, K3s Lightweight Kubernetes, VMware vCenter, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), oVirt, OpenSearch, Opensense, HAProxy

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Rancher - Kubernetes-based platforms reimagined

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with SUSE Rancher