Release v2.0.0 Tech Preview
Today, we are very happy to announce the availability of the tech preview of Rancher 2.0. This release kept our engineering team extremely busy for the last four to five months, and we are excited to finally unveil what we’ve been working on. Along with this initial preview release, we plan on releasing a regular cadence of builds to showcase more features, address bugs, and incorporate your invaluable feedback.
So, what’s new?
With 2.0, Rancher now bases its architecture and every cluster/environment on Kubernetes. While 1.0 already supported installing, operating, and managing Kubernetes environments, we’ve always felt that it did not mesh with the rest of the Rancher user experience. In 2.0, we remedied that. Not only do you get access to the native Kubernetes dashboard UI and kubectl, but now the Rancher UX (CLI, API, UI, and Docker compose) works directly on top of Kubernetes. Think of 2.0 as an enhanced add-on to the Kubernetes platform where you can continue to use all of the existing Rancher features you know and love, along with leveraging the rich Kubernetes ecosystem and rapid innovations.
We are, of course, highly biased with this release and feel this is definitely the next step in making day-to-day Docker and Kubernetes use incredibly simple. We highly recommend you try out the build yourself and please, please provide us with your comments and suggestions.
Helpful Links
Quick Start Guide: https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.6/en/quick-start-guide/
Forums for feedback/comments/suggestions: Rancher 2.0 Tech Preview - Rancher Labs
User Slack: https://slack.rancher.io/ #2-0-tech-preview
Important
For the purpose of the tech preview, we will always update rancher/server:preview with the latest preview builds until we GA. Once that happens, we will update the appropriate latest and stable tags as required.
Versions in the Current Tagged Preview
Note: Please use
rancher/server:previewto get the most recent preview release.
Current Preview Release:
- rancher/server:v2.0.0-alpha8
- rancher/agent:v2.0-alpha4
- rancher/lb-service-haproxy:v0.8.1
- rancher-v1.0.0-alpha3
Supported Docker Versions
- Docker 1.12.6
- Docker 1.13.1
- Docker 17.03-ce
- Docker 17.06-ce
New Features
Note: Please bear in mind that, with this preview release, not all features are ready for consumption.
You might find some features disabled in the UI. We will quickly provide upcoming builds as
they become available. The following are some of the highlighted features for this preview build.
- 2.0 User Interface - We completely reworked the new user interface to provide the same Rancher UX on top of Kubernetes. New enhancements include:
- Resizable “exec shell” and “view logs” → One of the most requested enhancements from the 1.0 UI.
- Multi-select actions for just about any resource.
- Search options for the majority of Rancher resources, like containers, hosts, catalog, and more.
- New list/table-based view options for containers and hosts, including filter options on table headers.
- A reformatted Catalog page to improve search functionality. Each instance of a catalog item now displays under the “Apps” tab for easier management.
- Brand new Container and Host management/detail/create pages.
- Enhanced rollback functionality that includes showing the diffs of older versions and the capability to revert up to X revisions back.
- Improved general scale and UI responsiveness.
- Clusters and Environments - By taking advantage of Kubernetes, Rancher is now introducing the concept of a cluster (where you add your hosts) and allowing you to create multiple environments (think K8s namespaces) on top of clusters. This enables containers to share the same physical nodes, but takes advantage of K8s namespaces for individual workspaces.
- Importing Kubernetes - Rancher is now capable of managing K8s clusters from anywhere. You have the option of creating your own k8s cluster, operated by Rancher. Or, you can import k8s clusters from popular hosting providers, like GKE and ACS to bring-your-own deployments created from popular tools like kops and kubeadm.
- Host Templates - All new hosts created from our Docker Machine integration will automatically be templatized, so you can use them to quickly launch additional hosts from the same cloud provider without having to re-enter the same info.
Known Major Issues
- Creating a container before the System environment is healthy will result in the following error:
"service account default/default was not found, retry after the service account is created". This usually happens when you add your first node as it may take several minutes before all required system services and k8s components have been fully activated. You can verify the health of the System environment by changing your environment on the top right toSystem. Once the System environment is healthy, you can relaunch or create new containers. - This tech preview does not support upgrades from previous versions, HA mode and requires access to DockerHub (no airgap support).
- Removing nodes from an imported k8s cluster will not be properly reflected in Rancher.
- There is a bug associated with adding hosts via a cloud provider. If you hit an error, simply delete and retry.
- Currently, only host bind mounted volumes work. The catalog has been pared down to eliminate the apps that currently use anonymous volumes or named volumes. As we introduce volume support, we’ll add those apps back into the catalog.