Canonical Enterprise Kubernetes vs. SUSE Rancher

SUSE Rancher as a management tool becomes useful on a larger scale. Small deployments not so much. If someone also requires Kubernetes capacity or storage, Rancher is an excellent choice. Also, without Kubernetes' skills, it is unlikely that Rancher deployment is going to be a success. Then again if someone else is managing your Kubernetes capacity, setting up the software's capacity will yield greater control. Rancher is not a very integrated solution similar to others in the market.

Incentivized

• Public and private cloud infrastructure providers based on K8s CAPI
• REST API that can be used to integrate company services with Rancher
• GUI that is easy to learn and use in daily operations
• Builtin GitOps automation solution based on Fleet project
• It is fully open source

• No possibility to snapshot Projects. You can snapshot and restore the whole Kubernetes cluster, but not a Project or Namespace. For this, you have to use external tools.
• You cannot detach the Rancher-created Kubernetes clusters from Rancher management.

Overall it deserves an 8 out of 10. The platform is very easy to use as long as the UI is stable. We have had a few buggy versions in the past. However the CLI is excellent and the platform is simple to manage and maintain. It is easy to deploy and offer for company wide use which increases utilization and ROI.

Incentivized

The documentation is quite complete and there is a very active community that is willing to collaborate and answer questions for those who are just starting out.

SUSE Rancher is an excellent choice for managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, especially when catering to different teams with distinct access rights and requirements. It allows us to deploy these clusters on-premises across various sites or in the cloud. However, if you’re dealing with only one or a few Kubernetes clusters, using SUSE Rancher might introduce unnecessary complexity. This is where EKS wins, as its native cloud based abilities are better suited to scale, support higher complexity and larger demand.

Incentivized

• Shortens "Time-to-Market" factor for new business applications or implementing new functionalities. From 1 to 50 microservices-based business applications in 6 years.
• 24/7 availability, generates more money. There are many infrastructure components that are regularly powered-off for maintenance or upgrade, bur we rarely are turning off our downstream Kubernetes clusters where our business applications lives.
• Single Point of Contact with platform maintenance and development Team, eases implementation of new business applications