Happy New Year from Rancher Labs!

As we start a new year, I’d like to thank the Rancher community for a great 2016. 2016 was an awesome year for Rancher Labs, and we’ve been fortunate to have a deeply engaged community of open source users and developers, customers, and partners. In March, [we shipped our 1.0 GA release], and since then Rancher has established itself as a leading product in the container ecosystem. 2016 was especially rewarding because of the tremendous amount of support we received from our users and customers. So many of you have posted [insightful articles], [blog posts], forum questions and answers, and GitHub issues, and seeing how users talk about us [on Twitter] and other social media platforms drives us to work harder. We are continually inspired by the great stories people have about how they use Rancher, like those by like those by Dispatch, [LateRooms.com], and Alertacall. We are grateful to users [who are willing to share their experiences using Rancher with the world], and to our friends at Align Technology who are so enthusiastic about our product that they organized the first [Rancher user group in the US]. In 2016, our product development was guided by a few key ideas, and our community of users will continue to see us expand upon these in 2017:

A rich application catalog. Rancher brought one-click deployments for complex multi-container apps to the market in 2015. In 2016, the Rancher community contributed over 100 catalog entries in categories such as monitoring, big data, CI, analytics, and many more. A rich catalog experience continues to be a great attraction of Rancher.

The ability to run any orchestrator. There is perhaps no other area in the container ecosystem as vibrant and innovative as container orchestration and scheduling, and Rancher remains the only product in the industry that supports and distributes multiple container orchestration and scheduling frameworks. By building a simple, streamlined experience and providing supported distributions of Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm, Rancher dramatically simplifies what an organization has to do to deploy and manage containers in production.

Powerful, modular infrastructure services. In 2016, we improved popular infrastructure services like multi-host networking and load balancing within Rancher. [Rancher 1.2] achieved an important milestone in introducing the full support for CNI container networking and FlexVolume storage plugin frameworks.

Ability to run on any cloud. Rancher’s vision has always been to make computing infrastructure a commodity, and to make clouds completely interchangeable. Containers have already made applications packages portable, but by integrating a powerful set of infrastructure services in networking, storage, and security, Rancher makes it possible for applications to become truly cloud-agnostic.

Despite being relatively young, there is no doubt that technologies like Docker and Kubernetes are achieving mainstream adoption, and we are excited by the role Rancher has in helping organizations adopt these technologies. We will continue to work closely with our open source user community and our growing customer base in 2017, but you can expect us to be guided by the following principles as we do so:

Rancher will continue to support and integrate mainstream container technologies for our users. With Rancher, organizations are never at risk of technology lock-in.

Rancher will simplify the task of running containers in production. We continue to innovate in our user experience to bring container adoption to the mass market.

Rancher will work to build a comprehensive infrastructure platform for containers. We believe there are many areas to innovate in building out an infrastructure platform for containers, so organizations will no longer need to worry about where they get their computing resources. We are working on a number of projects in this area. Keep an eye out for our announcements in 2017.

In such a fast-moving market, I can’t imagine all the new technologies and market opportunities the container ecosystem will create in 2017. And I can’t wait to find out.