Rancher adds support for Docker Machine provisioning.

This week we released Rancher 0.12, which adds support for provisioning hosts using Docker Machine. We’re really excited to get this feature out, because it makes launching Rancher-enabled Docker hosts easier than ever. If you’re not familiar with Docker Machine, it is a project that allows cloud providers to develop standard \“drivers\” for provisioning cloud infrastructure on the fly. You can learn more about it on the Docker website. The first cloud we’re supporting with Docker Machine is Digital Ocean. For our initial release, we chose Digital Ocean, because it is an excellent implementation of the machine driver. As always, the Digital Ocean team has focused on simplicity and user experience, and were fantastic to work with during our testing. Docker machine drivers are already available for many public cloud providers, as well as vCenter, CloudStack, OpenStack and other private cloud platforms. We will be adding support for additional drivers over the next few weeks, and documenting how you can use any driver you like. Please feel free to let us know if there are drivers you would like us to prioritize. Now, let me walk you through using Docker Machine with Rancher. To get started, click on the \“Regsiter a New Host\” link in the Hosts tab within Rancher. If this is the first time you’ve added a host, you’ll be presented with a Host Setup dialog that asks you to confirm the DNS host name or IP address that hosts should use to connect to the Rancher API. Confirm this setting and click Save. Once that is completed, you’ll be taken to the Add Host page, where you’ll see a new tab for provisioning Digital Ocean hosts. To provision a Digital Ocean machine, fill out the relevant information about the host you want to provision, inlcuding the OS image, size and Digital Ocean region. You’ll need to have a Digital Ocean access token, which you can get by creating an account on their site. Once you hit create, you’ll be returned to the hosts page where you will see your new host being created. Creating the host will take a few minutes, as the VM needs to be provisioned, configured with Docker, and bootstrapped as a Rancher host. But once it’s done, the UI will automatically update to show the new host. At this point, you have a fully enabled Docker host. You can click the Add Container link to start adding containers. We hope you find this feature useful and welcome your feedback. As always, you can submit any feature requests or other issues to the Rancher GitHub repo. In the next few weeks, we’ll be adding the ability to export the Docker machine configuration so that you can deploy containers outside of Rancher, more verbose status updates during machine creation, and (of course) more Machine drivers. If you’d like to talk with one of our engineers and learn more about Rancher, please feel free to request a demo, and we’ll walk you through Rancher and answer all of your questions.