Preface

Rancher Labs quickly established itself as a no-nonsense, results-driven organization. Despite early challenges—such as adapting to the rapid rise of Kubernetes as the dominant orchestration platform while continuing to support Docker-based workflows—the team maintained a clear vision: enabling enterprises to manage container workloads across any infrastructure.

The team at Rancher Labs were methodical in their approach, checking each change against customer needs and market realities. Their pragmatic culture became one of Rancher's greatest strengths. Instead of chasing unrealistic goals, they focused on straightforward objectives that balanced ambition with feasibility. This kept the company on track through two major product evolutions, global market shifts, and even a pandemic, making their products the first choice for many teams seeking a platform to manage Kubernetes at scale.

In practice, Rancher’s transition from Docker-based orchestration to Kubernetes-native practices—adopting containerd as the default runtime, integrating the Cluster API (CAPI) for declarative cluster lifecycle management, and using static pods for control plane components—required significant refactoring of its underlying architecture. Early on, the team identified that replacing the container runtime alone was insufficient. They re-architected the control plane to run as static pods managed by the kubelet, updated cluster provisioning workflows to leverage CAPI controllers, and redefined APIs to align with Kubernetes-native abstractions. This included integrating tightly with Kubernetes primitives such as Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, and Ingress Controllers. These changes laid the foundation for Rancher’s core feature: centralized, vendor-neutral management of multiple Kubernetes clusters, regardless of where they were deployed: on-premises environments, public clouds, hybrid setups, and edge devices.

Central to Rancher’s success was its commitment to vendor neutrality. While hyperscale providers were busy pushing their own managed Kubernetes offerings, Rancher engineered a platform that allowed enterprises to provision and operate clusters across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and even bare-metal servers. Behind the scenes, Rancher included capabilities like automatic certificate management, role-based access control (RBAC) configuration, and cluster health checks, sparing administrators from error-prone manual setups.

Rancher’s open source foundation also fostered an active community of contributors and maintainers. Through collaboration on GitHub, the team gained insights into real-world enterprise use cases—everything from small dev/test clusters to production environments running hundreds of microservices. This feedback loop accelerated Rancher’s feature development and made it easier to prioritize enhancements that would have the most impact on users, like multi-tenant security, built-in monitoring (via Prometheus/Grafana stacks), Istio-based service mesh integration, and more.

The company extended Kubernetes’ reach to resource-constrained environments with k3s