1 Introduction #
On the digital transformation journey to a full cloud-native landscape, the use of microservices becomes the main approach with the dominant technology for such container orchestration being Kubernetes.[1] With its large community of developers and abundant features and capabilities, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard and is included across most container-as-a-service platforms. With all of these technologies in place, both developer and operation teams can effectively deploy, manage and deliver functionality to their end users in a resilient and agile manner.
1.1 Motivation #
Once on such a digital transformation journey, also relevant to focus on areas like:
- Workload(s)
Determine how to manage and launch internally developed containerized, microservice workloads
- Kubernetes
While any developer or organization may simply start with a single, Kubernetes-based deployment, it is very common for that number of cluster instances to rapidly grow. While each of these may have specific focus areas, it becomes imperative to figure out how to use, manage, maintain and replicate all of these instances over time.
This is where SUSE Rancher leads the industry, being able to manage access, usage, infrastructure and applications across clusters, that are Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF[2]) conformant and certified[3], anywhere across edge, on-premise data centers, or cloud service providers. SUSE Rancher optimizes creating and managing Kubernetes clusters like:
and deployed across various supported infrastructure elements.
- Compute Platform(s)
To optimize availability, performance, scalability and integrity, assess current system or hosting platforms
from Independent Hardware Vendors (IHV), such as Supermicro ® as the platform for physical, bare metal, hypervisors and virtual machines
1.2 Scope #
The scope of this document is to provide a layered reference configuration for SUSE Rancher. This can be done in a variety of solution layered stacks, to become a fundamental component of a managing multiple Kubernetes ecosystems.
1.3 Audience #
This document is intended for IT decision makers, architects, system administrators and technicians who are implementing a flexible, software-defined Kubernetes management platform. One should still be familiar with the traditional IT infrastructure pillars — networking, computing and storage — along with the local use cases for sizing, scaling and limitations within each pillars' environments.