Preface

Rancher and Kubernetes have been driving the wave of DevOps adoption for both on-premises and cloud workloads. This book will guide you through the history of Rancher and Kubernetes and how they came into being. We will dive into how to design, build, and manage your Rancher environment. We will then build upon Rancher, deploying a range of cluster types, including RKE, RKE2, k3s, EKS, and GKE. With each of these cluster types, we will go over how they work, design a solution around them, and finally, deploy them using Rancher.

We will then shift into getting your clusters production-ready. This includes how we back up and restore the different cluster types and monitor the health of our clusters and the application hosted on them. Then, we will dive into how to provide the additional services needed outside of core Kubernetes services, including persistent storage with Longhorn, security/compliance using OPA Gatekeeper, and how to bring dynamic scaling to our clusters.

We will then close the book by covering how to build and deploy our application in a Rancher/Kubernetes ecosystem using tools such as Drone CI for our CI/CD pipeline and Harbor for hosting build artifacts. We will then dive into the deep topic of Helm charts and how they bring package management to our clusters. Finally, we will close by covering resource management and cost reporting to address the goal of turning IT from a black hole into which you throw money into the profit center it can be.