On June 15, Rancher Labs announced the availability in Beta of Rancher, an open source platform for managing infrastructure for containers. Rancher’s platform delivers enhanced visibility into infrastructure performance for environments that include Docker containers. The platform enables communication between containers residing on different hosts or cloud platforms in conjunction with elastic load balancing functionality that optimizes the distribution of resources across different containers. Additionally, the Rancher platform’s functionality includes storage management, resource management and service-discovery that allows for the discovery of services subsequent to container self-registration as services within a specific infrastructure. Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO of Rancher Labs, remarked on the significance of the Rancher platform as follows:
Much of the excitement around Docker is its use as a universal packaging and distribution format. However, as users deploy containers across different infrastructures, they quickly realize that different clouds, virtualization platforms and bare metal servers have dramatically different infrastructure capabilities. By building a common infrastructure backplane across any resource, Rancher implements an entirely new approach to hybrid cloud computing.
Here, Liang elaborates on the way in which the Rancher platform supports the ability to “deploy containers across different infrastructures” and thereby undergird a technology ecosystem that enables communication between containers housed in different infrastructures. Unlike many of the existing container management platforms, Rancher Labs focuses on infrastructure in contrast to application performance management and, as such, represents one of the increasing number of vendors dedicated to cloud-based infrastructure management and visibility, albeit in this case in the context of container-based applications. The Rancher team features an impressive roster of talent including a leadership team that built Cloud.com, the company that morphed into the well known Apache CloudStack software platform. The Beta release of Rancher builds on the June 9 finalization of a $10M Series A capital raise from Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners.
Cloud Computing Today 