Rancher Labs recently announced $20M in Series B funding led by a new investor in the form of GRC SinoGreen. Existing investors Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round. The announcement of Rancher’s Series B round comes roughly six weeks after news of the general availability of Rancher 1.0, the open source container management platform that supports the Docker Swarm and Kubernetes container orchestration frameworks. The Series B funding will be used to support the expansion of sales and marketing operations and, as noted by Rancher co-founder Shannon Williams, in an interview with Cloud Computing Today, iteratively accelerate product development as a result of customer feedback. The funding raise underscores meteoric adoption of Rancher’s open source product and its unique positioning as a cloud-agnostic container management platform that works on any public cloud, private cloud or on-premise deployment. As one of the few container management platforms that gives customers the flexibility to deploy more than one container orchestration framework for concurrent container deployments, Rancher’s capital raise positions it strongly to support customer demand and consolidate its leadership position in the container management space.
Tag: Rancher Labs
Rancher Labs Announces General Availability Of Container Management Platform Rancher 1.0
This week, Rancher Labs announced the general availability of the container management platform Rancher 1.0. Rancher 1.0 allows users to take advantage of the Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration frameworks, while nevertheless delivering a unified management experience for production-grade container deployments. Organizations can use the open source Rancher platform to deploy and manage Docker Swarm and Kubernetes clusters of any size on any cloud, on-premise or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Meanwhile, the platform’s management console delivers deep visibility into container deployments in ways that allow users to enhance its software development and delivery lifecycle. Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang commented on the success of the Rancher platform as follows:
Since announcing our beta product less than a year ago, Rancher Labs has experienced incredible demand, as well as received encouraging and helpful feedback and community support for this open platform which has enabled us to make meaningful enhancements to Rancher. Now, with well over a million downloads, Rancher has quickly become the platform of choice for teams serious about running containers in production.
Liang remarks on how the “incredible demand” for the platform has led to feedback and customer engagement that accelerated enhancement of the open source Rancher platform and subsequently positioned it strongly as one of the industry’s leading container management platforms. Spearheaded by a rich user interface, its support for both Docker Swarm and Kubernetes and a cloud-agnostic framework, Rancher gives users a centralized platform for enterprise grade container deployment and management. In addition, the platform features a rich application catalogue that facilitates the creation of templates for storing applications that can subsequently be re-used, tweaked and variously customized. Rancher Labs supports a commercially licensed version of its container management platform that wraps professional services around the open source Rancher container management platform. Headquartered in Cupertino, CA, the company has raised $10M to date from Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners.
Rancher Labs Announces Orchestration Functionality For Persistent Storage On Docker Containers
Private container vendor Rancher Labs today announced support for the orchestration of persistent storage services for Docker. The new functionality introduced by Rancher Labs surmounts challenges related to the storage of persistent data on the part of Docker applications. Rancher Labs now renders it possible for developers to orchestrate the deployment of storage services onto container host machines in conjunction with the use of software defined storage platforms such as Gluster, Ceph and Nexenta. Moreover, the new functionality from Rancher allows customers to launch applications that leverage storage services in support of stateful application services. Rancher’s integration with storage services such as Gluster, Ceph and Nexenta means that customers can take advantage of advanced storage functionality from storage vendors such as backup, remote replication and snapshot. Moreover, Rancher’s support for the orchestration of persistent storage services enables customers to deploy applications with storage services onto a multitude of environments and host machines that include public and private clouds as well as virtual machines and bare metal servers. By integrating persistent storage into Docker container management, Rancher Labs empowers customers to create and deploy container-based applications that contain persistent storage, thereby facilitating the development of applications that need stateful databases to realize their functionality. As such, today’s announcement marks a notable breakthrough in container management by bringing the orchestration of persistent storage to Docker containers and enhancing the ability of customers to deploy applications that require the storage of persistent data.
Rancher Labs Releases Container Infrastructure Platform In Beta After $10M Series A Funding Raise
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 