Rancher 1.6 - EBS Support, Secrets, and CLI Enhancements

We’ve just released Rancher v1.6, the latest version of our container management platform. While we still recommend that production or mission-critical deployments use our most recent stable release, we’re excited to share what’s new in v1.6. In this release, we’ve built greater control for our users over their storage and secrets.

Validating EBS Support

We first implemented support for EBS before Rancher itself was even generally available, but in v1.6, we’re removing the ‘experimental’ tag. In addition to fixing some minor issues flagged by our community, this release contains:

• **Availability-zone aware scheduling **for better container management within the same AZ
• Additional options for EBS volumes: now users can specify options like volumetype, encrypted, and snapshotltd

Consider our EBS support ready for production! As a side note, Rancher EBS support and development of Project Longhorn should not be considered conflicting efforts – we will always support popular and leading technologies, AWS included. While Project Longhorn is slated for eventual inclusion into Rancher, it’s still experimental, and for now Longhorn and Rancher remain separate.

Rancher Secrets Support in Compose

In Rancher v1.4, we added the ability to handle secrets in Rancher using Vault Transit. In Rancher v1.6, this feature remains experimental, though we’ve fixed bugs identified since its initial release. Moreover, this latest release also includes the ability to create secrets using Compose and Rancher CLI. It delivers on a popular request from our community, as it streamlines the ability to deploy workloads that rely on secrets rather than pushing users to administer secrets through the Rancher UI.

Rancher CLI versus rancher-compose CLI

For the past couple of releases, we’ve developed Rancher CLI alongside its older predecessor, rancher-compose CLI. Rancher-compose CLI functionality has merely become a subset of Rancher CLI functionality. Going forward, we’ll be combining these efforts and new features will only be developed on Rancher CLI. We encourage you to read more about Rancher v1.6 in the release notes, and to reach out to us on Twitter @Rancher_Labs or our forums with questions and feedback. We’re always happy to hear more from our community!