The first have of 2021 has been quite a half year at SUSE / Rancher. Numerous new open source projects have been launched covering a wide array of areas. I’m enjoying seeing all the innovation taking place as these new projects try to find their footing. These are in addition to projects like Harvester that started in 2020. Let’s take a look at some of these projects…
Rancher Desktop
Rancher Desktop is a desktop app for Mac and Windows the provides Kubernetes and container management. It has a variety of features such as letting you select your version of Kubernetes, testing workloads across an upgrade, and more.
The diagram below shows a little about how Rancher Desktop interacts with the underlying platform to provide Kubernetes and container management. Windows is handled in such a way that even Windows Home users can use Kubernetes.
KIM
There are a handful of tools to create, push, and pull container images. KIM is a new one that works with k3s. It leverages buildkit and has a worker that runs in k3s.
One of the nice elements of this is that images built with KIM are immediately available for use on the k3s node that built it. This is useful when KIM is used with Rancher Desktop.
Epinio
An opinionated platform on top of Kubernetes. Epinio is a modern take on a PaaS from people with years of experience building them. Imagine a PaaS being created in a Kubernetes native world rather than one created before or outside of Kubernetes and then being bolted on. That’s what Epinio tries to do.
Kubewarden
Security is important. Policy enforcement is a way to help improve security. Kubewarden is a policy engine with a new twist. You can write policies in any language that compiles to web assembly (WASM).
The diagram below, from the Kubewarden websites, illustrates the architecture.
Opni
From the Opni website:
Opni = AIOps for Kubernetes + logging + monitoring
With Opni you don’t need to know AI to use it to help you with your operations. You can learn more in the video of the SUSECon 2021 presentation.
Hypper
Hypper provides Kubernetes package management for cluster admins. It’s build on top of the Helm SDK and uses Helm charts as its packages.
What separates Hypper from Helm is its management of cluster wide services such as operators, monitoring, and logging. It is designed to make management of these services simple and straight forward.
The diagram below shows how the source is organized and how it works with Kubernetes.
Conclusion
At SUSE we are experiencing a season of innovation. Some of these projects will succeed while others we will learn from. More projects will be coming as we continue to try out new ideas to see what comes of them.
If any of these projects catch your interest, please give them a try and share some feedback.