Rancher joins the CNCF Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program

Earlier this year, I received an email invitation from Dan Kohn, Executive Director of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), about a meeting at KubeCon Berlin to explore a Kubernetes conformance program. That effort culminated in today’s official launch of the Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program. Rancher is among the first group of vendors and community members participating in this effort. Users of the Rancher Kubernetes distribution now have the peace of mind of running on a certified Kubernetes platform. Since we launched Rancher Kubernetes distribution in Rancher 1.0, the Kubernetes technology ecosystem has continued to evolve rapidly. The Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program ensures users will get a consistent experience, and can easily migrate their workload between any conformant Kubernetes distro from Rancher and other vendors. As much as we like people to use Rancher Kubernetes distribution, we believe you should be able to use the Kubernetes implementation best suited for your environment. For example:

1. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure users who may want to use managed Kubernetes service offered by the cloud provider. With GKE and AKS, users can focus on their applications without having to worry about operating their own Kubernetes clusters.
2. Users who are interested in the out-of-the-box support for Kubernetes provided by Linux distributors such as Canonical. The Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes is an attractive choice for Ubuntu users.

We recently launched Rancher 2.0, a unique product in our industry that is built for a world where Kubernetes becomes the standard container infrastructure platform. Rancher 2.0 provides a built-in Kubernetes distribution that you can use on platforms such as AWS, vSphere, and bare metal servers, which do not yet have built-in support for Kubernetes. More importantly, Rancher 2.0 provides a rich set of capabilities for managing Kubernetes clusters and application running on any certified Kubernetes clusters from any Kubernetes platform and distribution vendor. To learn more about how Rancher 2.0 can help you manage Kubernetes, please join us for the online meetup on 30 November. We’ll be taking a closer look at how Rancher 2.0 provides centralized management of multiple Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds.