Introducing the Rancher Beta Program

Today we announced the beta availability of Rancher, our open source Docker infrastructure and management software. It is an exciting day for our team, and a great opportunity to say thank you to all the people who have worked on the open source Rancher project, blogged and tweeted about using Rancher, and helped other new users on our support groups. For the last seven months, Rancher has been an alpha project, and throughout that time we’ve had a wonderful group of early users and testers trying out the product, suggesting enhancements, documenting bugs, and contributing code. We’ve added an enormous number of new features, which we’ve been talking about here in this blog as they appeared in the product, and documented lots of interesting use cases for how you might use Rancher to manage Docker deployments. By making Rancher available as a beta, we are indicating a new phase in the development of Rancher. During alpha, we prioritized pace of development and achieving minimum viability over stability and backward compatibility. Now as we start the beta, we are focused on the robustness of the platform, user experience and completeness of features. Just this week we implemented new documentation websites for Rancherand RancherOS to provide more clarity on how to use our projects. As always, Rancher

is open source software, and we hope you’ll take the time to download the Rancher beta from GitHub and set up an environment to test it out. As we go through beta we will continue to introduce new features to Rancher, and we hope you’ll give us your feedback on how you like the platform. Please submit any issuesyou encounter to GitHub, and don’t hesitate to make suggestions or submit pull requests. We are also running a formal beta program for anyone who needs additional support with Rancher, and would like more input on the product direction. Participants in the beta program receive:

• Implementation and configuration support for Rancher.
• Access to Rancher’s engineering team for troubleshooting and bug fixes throughout the beta.
• Road map discussions with Rancher’s product management team.
• Online training for employees on using Docker and Rancher.

In exchange for these benefits, we ask that participants work with our team, to provide feedback on product functionality, suggestions for enhancements, and document any issues they encounter. Anyone is welcome to apply to the beta program, however at this point we will only be accepting a small number of participants. I hope you’ll consider applying. Thank you once again to everyone who participated in the Rancher alpha program. Tomorrow, June 16th, we will be hosting an online meetup to talk about the latest features in Rancher, If you’re interested in getting a closer look at Rancher, please register now by clicking the button below.