Canonical Announces Cloud Native Platform, Powered by Rancher

Partnership Combines Rancher 2.0 with Canonical Kubernetes and Leading Cloud OS, Ubuntu

Today, we joined Canonical in announcing the Canonical Cloud Native Platform, a new offering that provides complete support and management for Kubernetes in the Enterprise. The Cloud Native Platform combines Rancher 2.0 container management software with Canonical Ubuntu and Ubuntu Kubernetes, and will be available when Rancher 2.0 launches next spring. This announcement is an enormous accomplishment for our team here at Rancher. By partnering with Canonical around Kubernetes, we hope to expose the thousands of organizations that rely on Ubuntu to the impact a container management platform like Rancher can have on how they build and run their applications. All the power of Rancher 2.0 will be included in the new product, including Kubernetes deployment on any infrastructure; support for hosted Kubernetes from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft; security policy management; centralized access control and RBAC; workload management UI; centralized application catalog; integrated Prometheus monitoring; log management; and CI/CD. As Dustin Kirkland, VP of Product Development at Canonical, said during our recent Rancher 2.0 announcement, “with Canonical’s experience deploying Kubernetes on Ubuntu in the enterprise, we see first-hand the tremendous opportunity for Rancher 2.0 to solve container management at scale.” This announcement comes right on the heels of the Amazon EKS announcement, further reinforcing Kubernetes as the leading orchestration choice for running containerized applications. With this offering, Rancher Labs and Canonical can support and manage the entire software stack, from the OS to the containers delivering your application, whether running on your own infrastructure or as a managed service from your favorite service provider. Like most partnerships, our work with Canonical started with joint users who validated early on the use of Rancher with Ubuntu and Canonical’s Kubernetes distro. Today, according to user-supplied data, more than half of the tens of thousands of hosts powering Rancher deployments run Ubuntu as the OS. Internally, we’ve tested on Ubuntu since the very first release of Rancher, and have worked closely with the Canonical team on joint customers for more than a year. As we got to know the team at Canonical, we were thrilled to hear they were also big fans of Rancher and have been using our open-source software internally on their web development team.

Did you know that @Canonical’s web dev team uses #Rancher to stage and test changes before pushing to @ubuntu .com? High-5, @Rancher_Labs! https://t.co/Wpwe42kySY

— Dustin Kirkland (@dustinkirkland) August 25, 2017

I’m convinced 2018 is going to be a massive year for Kubernetes adoption in the enterprise. I think for many organizations, this combination of Canonical and Rancher will provide an excellent platform for providing Kubernetes as a secure service to developers and operations teams. If you’d like to see how all of this fits together, you can learn more at the Ubuntu Enterprise Summit during the special Kubernetes announcement from KubeCon session, or come by our booth G3 at KubeCon and let us know what you think.