rancher

In this blog post, I’ll explain how you deploy a brand new Kubernetes Cluster with Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). Rancher Kubernetes Engine doesn’t include the Rancher management application itself and will deploy a vanilla Kubernetes Cluster for you, the exact same thing as kubeadm can do for you but much more simple!

For DevOps engineers like me, command-line tools help me to automate stuff. Rancher provides two CLI tools: rancher and rancher-compose. I use these two tools to automate deployments, upgrades, and cleaning up if environments aren’t in use anymore. Basically, it is possible to completely automate your continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline (but that is something for another blog post!).

Number one challenge when you are using Docker in production environments is storage. On you local development machine it is possible to mount a local directory path into your docker container, but in production environments, this isn’t an option because you don’t know if the path exists and if the docker container is always running on the same node. A solution is NFS, and when using Rancher, Rancher-NFS.

Do you want to use Docker containers in production on a CentOS 7 machine, but you think it is hard? Then have a look at Rancher! Rancher is a container management platform to deploy docker containers in a production environment very easily.

As a developer, I used GitHub a lot to store my (private) projects. This works great, but I do miss the CI integration as done by GitLab. I could use public services like Travis, but they do charge for private projects.

Because we’re using GitLab and GitLab CI at work I wondered how much work it would be to setup my private GitLab server on my Rancher environment. In this blog post, I will share the results with you.