Rancher on Hybrid Cloud, Kubernetes at the Edge, and Open Standards

In this podcast, Shannon Williams, co-founder and president at Rancher Labs and Darren Shepherd, co-founder and CTO at Rancher Labs sat down with InfoQ podcast co-host Daniel Bryant. Topics discussed included: the adoption of hybrid cloud across organisations, the evolution of Kubernetes as a key abstraction for portability and cross-cloud security, running thousands of Kubernetes clusters at the edge, and the value of open standards.

Why listen to this podcast

- Organisations are adopting hybrid cloud strategies. The use of containers to package and run applications across clouds has seen large adoption over the past five years. Containers and Kubernetes are everywhere: the datacenter, the edge, embedded systems, and other locations.

- Two enterprise use cases for Kubernetes stand out: providing standardised abstractions and APIs to increase portability across vendors and cloud platforms; and providing a framework and homogenised foundation on which to build and implement (cross cloud) security solutions.

- Open standards support interoperability and drive innovation. The CNCF is becoming the natural home for open cloud technologies. The Rancher team have donated Longhorn, their cloud-native distributed storage platform for Kubernetes that was recently announced as generally available, to the CNCF.

- With the success of lightweight Kubernetes distributions, such as Rancher’s K3s, engineers are starting to deploy standalone Kubernetes clusters “by the thousands” to edge locations. Rancher has recently released Fleet, a new open source project that is focused on managing large collections (“fleets”) of Kubernetes clusters.

- Many developers and end users of Kubernetes simply want a platform-as-a-service (PaaS)-like experience. The next 12 months will see the community focus on the simplification of the Kubernetes ecosystem.

More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ https://bit.ly/31ZjYT1

You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq

Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq

Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8

Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ

Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq

Check the landing page on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/31ZjYT1