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Using microservices has become the main approach in the digital transformation journey to a full cloud-native landscape, with Kubernetes as the dominant technology for container orchestration. With its large community of developers and abundant features and capabilities, Kubernetes is included on most container-as-a-service (CaaS) platforms. By enabling operation teams to focus on infrastructure while developers deploy code the way they want, the SUSE Rancher offering helps accelerate an organization’s digital transformation and bring products to market faster. With these technologies in place, developer and operation teams can deploy, manage, and deliver functionality to their end users in a resilient and agile manner. For more information, see Kubernetes Basics.
On the digital journey, the following areas are the focus for organizations:
IT teams must determine how to manage and launch internally developed, containerized, microservice workloads.
While a developer or organization may start with a single Kubernetes-based deployment, it is common for the number of cluster instances to grow rapidly. While each instance may have specific focus areas, it becomes imperative to determine how to use, manage, maintain, and replicate all the instances over time.
SUSE Rancher leads the industry because of its ability to manage access, usage, infrastructure, and applications across clusters that are Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-conformant and certified anywhere—at the edge, in on-premises data centers, or in the cloud. SUSE Rancher optimizes creating and managing Kubernetes clusters such as:
The need for agility is driving developers toward more cloud-native methodologies that focus on microservices architectures and streamlined workflows. Container technologies such as Kubernetes embody this agile approach and help enable cloud-native transformation.
By unifying IT operations with Kubernetes, organizations realize benefits such as increased reliability, improved security, and greater efficiencies with standardized automation. Enterprises adopt Kubernetes infrastructure platforms for:
To optimize availability, performance, scalability, and integrity, businesses can assess system or hosting platforms from Independent Hardware Vendors (IHV) such as Dell Technologies for bare-metal machines or virtual machines on supported hypervisors.
Organizations that deploy Kubernetes clusters to unify IT operations can realize dramatic benefits such as:
Relying on upstream Kubernetes alone can introduce overhead and risk because Kubernetes clusters are typically deployed without central visibility and consistent security policies. These clusters must be managed independently.
A scalable Kubernetes deployment requires consideration of a large ecosystem, encompassing many software and infrastructure components and providers. Further, it requires the ability to continually address the needs and concerns of developers, IT operators, and businesses.