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documentation.suse.com / Layered Stack Deployment of Rancher Kubernetes Engine / Business aspect
Applies to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3, Rancher Kubernetes Engine 1.2.16

2 Business aspect

Agility is driving developers toward more cloud-native methodologies that focus on microservices architectures and streamlined workflows. Container technologies, like Kubernetes, embody this agile approach and help enable cloud-native transformation.

By unifying IT operations with Kubernetes, organizations realize key benefits like increased reliability, improved security and greater efficiencies with standardized automation. Therefore, Kubernetes infrastructure platforms are adopted by enterprises to deliver:

Cluster Operations

Improved Production and DevOps efficiencies with simplified cluster usage and robust operations

Security Policy & User Management

Consistent security policy enforcement plus advanced user management on any Kubernetes infrastructure

Access to Shared Tools & Services

A high level of reliability with easy, consistent access to a broad set of tools and services

2.1 Business problem

Many organizations are deploying Kubernetes clusters everywhere — in the cloud, on-premises, and at the edge — to unify IT operations. Such organizations can realize dramatic benefits, including:

  • Consistently deliver a high level of reliability on any infrastructure

  • Improve DevOps efficiency with standardized automation

  • Ensure enforcement of security policies on any infrastructure

However, simply relying on upstream Kubernetes alone can introduce extra overhead and risk because Kubernetes clusters are typically deployed:

  • Without central visibility

  • Without consistent security policies

  • And must be managed independently

Deploying a scalable kubernetes infrastructure requires consideration of a larger ecosystem, encompassing many software and infrastructure components and providers. Further, the ability to continually address the needs and concerns of:

Developers

For those who focus on writing code to build their apps securely using a preferred workflow, providing a simple, push-button deployment mechanism of their containerized workloads where needed.

IT Operators

General infrastructure requirements still rely upon traditional IT pillars are for the stacked, underlying infrastructure. Ease of deployment, availability, scalability, resiliency, performance, security and integrity are still core concerns to be addressed for administrative control and observability.

Beyond the core infrastructure software layers of managed Kubernetes clusters, organizations may be also be impacted by:

Compute Platform

Potential inconsistencies and impacts of multiple target system platforms for the distributed deployments of the cluster elements, across:

  • physical, baremetal, hypervisors and virtual machines

2.2 Business value

With Rancher Kubernetes Engine, the operation of Kubernetes is easily automated and entirely independent of the operating system and platform running. Using a supported version of the container runtime engine, one can deploy and run Kubernetes with Rancher Kubernetes Engine. It builds a cluster from a single command in a few minutes, and its declarative configuration makes Kubernetes upgrades atomic and safe.

By allowing operation teams to focus on infrastructure and developers to deploy code the way they want too, SUSE and the Rancher offerings helps bring products to market faster and accelerate an organization’s digital transformation.

SUSE Rancher is a fundamental part of the complete software stack for teams adopting containers. It provides DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads while also addressing the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across any targetedd infrastructure.

Developers

SUSE Rancher makes it easy to securely deploy containerized applications no matter where the Kubernetes infrastructure runs -– in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. Using Helm or the App Catalog to deploy and manage applications across any or all these environments, ensuring multi-cluster consistency with a single deployment process.

IT Operators

SUSE Rancher not only deploys and manages production-grade Kubernetes clusters from datacenter to cloud to the edge, it also unites them with centralized authentication, access control and observability. Further, it streamlines cluster deployment on bare metal or virtual machines and maintains them using defined security policies.

With this increased consistency of the managed Kubernetes infrastructure clusters, organizations benefit from an even higher level of the Cloud Native Computing model where each layer only relies upon the API and version of the adjacent layer, such as:

Compute Platform

Using the above software application and technology solutions with the server platforms offered by Dell Technologies provides many alternative for scale, cost-effectiveness and performance options that could align with local IT staff platform preferences:

  • density-optimized - high performance and efficiency for big data and the most demanding workloads

  • mission-critical - systems of intelligence to fuel your digital transformation in a world where time and data are the new currency and business continuity is expected

  • composable - fully adaptable and ready for Hybrid-IT to future-proof your data center for today’s workloads and tomorrow’s disruptors

  • IoT - realize the potential of the Internet of Things to provide compute at the network edge

  • cloud - high-capacity, mass-compute open infrastructure with security and software to match

  • and virtualized use cases.