My favorite ice cream store is just off Richmond Green, close to where I live in West London. On sunny days, locals queue around the block to buy their fantastic gelatos and sorbets. Every one of their customers knows that they could easily nip into the supermarket around the corner to buy hermetically sealed chocolate ice cream, but they queue anyway. Why? Because my favorite ice cream store offers a huge selection of delicious flavors that customers can combine in innovative ways under the expert guidance of their friendly staff. If the store owners ever did a deal with a giant food company to sell only one type of ice cream, they’d lose the trust of their customers, many of whom would go elsewhere.

Yesterday’s exciting news about SUSE acquiring Rancher Labs isn’t any different. Most people in the Kubernetes community know Rancher Labs has built its success on offering maximum choice to its legions of loyal users and customers. We’re not just 100 percent open source, we’re 100 percent open with no vendor lock-in. SUSE is acquiring Rancher Labs because they’re the same.

Today we’re announcing the general availability of our persistent storage solution built with Longhorn, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project. This cloud-native container storage solution directly answers the need for enterprise-grade, vendor-neutral persistent storage that supports the easy development of stateful applications within Kubernetes.

We’ve been working on persistent container storage for almost as long as we’ve been around as a company. We launched the Longhorn project in 2017, and then in 2019, we contributed it to the CNCF as a sandbox project. So it’s that CNCF open source project that is now generally available.

Despite the lockdown restrictions of the last six months, I'm delighted to announce that we've released Rancher 2.5 on schedule today. This latest release represents another major milestone of Rancher's "Computing Everywhere" strategy by delivering management capabilities that match the extraordinary popularity of Amazon EKS and our lightweight Kubernetes distribution, K3s.

When we released Rancher 2.4 in March 2020, we announced a series of significant under-the-hood changes that would pave the way for Rancher to support apps deployed across up to one million clusters. With Rancher 2.5, the inclusion of GitOps-based continuous delivery makes good on this promise. But more than that, Rancher now brings its industry-leading multi-cluster management capabilities to single cluster deployments everywhere.

Rancher 2.4 is here – with new under-the-hood changes that pave the way to supporting up to 1 million clusters. That’s probably the most exciting capability in the new version. But you might ask: why would anyone want to run thousands of Kubernetes clusters – let alone tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or more? At Rancher Labs, we believe the future of Kubernetes is multi-cluster and fully heterogeneous. This means ‘breaking the monolith’ into many clusters and running the best Kubernetes distribution for each environment and use case.

The argument that operational consistency in the hybrid cloud is only guaranteed through a vendor monoculture is simply false. Kubernetes management platforms like Rancher exist to provide IT Ops with the ability to manage CNCF-certified Kubernetes distributions running on-prem, in the cloud and in remote locations at the edge consistently through a single pane of glass.

This blog will examine how Rancher improves the life of DevOps teams already invested in AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) but looking to run workloads on-prem, with other cloud providers or, increasingly, at the edge. By reading this blog you will also discover how Rancher helps you escape the undeniable attractions of a vendor monoculture while lowering costs and mitigating risk.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked by a sales rep the following question: “The customer has looked at Stackalytics and is wondering why Rancher doesn’t have as many code commits as the competition. What do I say?”

For those of you unfamiliar with Stackalytics, it provides an activity snapshot, a developer selfie if you will, of commits and lines of code changed in different open source projects. Although a very worthwhile service, some vendors like to use it as proof of their technical prowess and commitment to an open-source project’s ecosystem.

But does the number of code commits by a vendor tell the full story?

Most B2B sales are known to take dozens of marketing touches. Of course, all these touches don’t have equal impact — there are key stages in the B2B customer journey that are important for marketing and sales to understand. So how do you choose a multi-touch attribution model that works at scale? In this short video, we’re going to look at the four most common models.