IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service vs. SUSE Rancher

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes offering, delivering user tools and built-in security for rapid delivery of applications that users can bind to cloud services related to IBM Watson®, IoT, DevOps and data analytics. As a certified K8s provider, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling, service discovery and load balancing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and secret and configuration management. The Kubernetes…N/A
SUSE Rancher
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Developed by Rancher Labs and now from SUSE, Rancher is open-source software that enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale, on any infrastructure across the data center, cloud, branch offices, and the network edge. Rancher centrally manages Kubernetes clusters across the organization in order to ensure security and accelerate transformation. Rancher is also available hosted. Hosted Rancher is a fully managed Rancher control plane - presented as the fastest, most cost…
$7,594.99
per year up to 500 nodes
Pricing
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Subscription license
7,594.99
per year up to 500 nodes
Standard Subscription
11,234.99
per year 10 nodes
Priority Subscription
30,514.99
per year 10 nodes
Management Server Priority Subscription
41,830.99
per year 1 instance
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Features
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
7.5
Ratings
3% below category average
SUSE Rancher
7.5
Ratings
3% below category average
Security and Isolation7.40 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Container Orchestration8.10 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Cluster Management6.40 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Storage Management7.90 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization7.90 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Discovery Tools7.10 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks7.90 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery7.40 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging7.30 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Small Businesses
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.6 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(0 ratings)
6.8
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.7
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cloud Kubernetes ServiceSUSE Rancher
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is ideal for deploying modern applications on a microservices architecture -- where easy scaling and ability to update are important. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service also handles automated deployments and load balancing very well, particularly if you're already working in the IBM Cloud ecosystem. There are applications less suited to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service -- such as very small applications, where managing an IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster would be overkill. Also, users not familiar with container organization might find IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service to be a challenge to manage effectively.
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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.
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Pros
  • IBM has a strong focus on serverless and Kubernetes. This shows in the platform. Deploying containers to Kubernetes was very easy.
  • Deploying a Kubernetes cluster through the GUI is very easy and quick. On top of that, IBM Cloud offers a single node cluster for Free.
  • Container Registry is a very good product for managing container images. Integration with Kubernetes was seemless.
  • Portability. To transition from Google Cloud Kubernetes to IBM Cloud Kubernetes took almost no effort. We mostly use the CLI and the standard tools such as kubectl were present.
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  • 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
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Cons
  • I constantly get this error even when everything is well configured prefect.exceptions.AuthorizationError: [{'path': ['auth_info'], 'message': 'AuthenticationError: Forbidden', 'extensions': {'code': 'UNAUTHENTICATED'}}]
  • Then sometimes the error disapear without changine anything, happened twice to me. Should there be an issue with the authentication service? Please let's improve or let users know why this may be happening.
  • Improve the UX in the browse console when removing many images at once
  • UX on the process of installing KeyCloack operator
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  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
We have our application running on a CentOS compartment on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. We have been utilizing the help since IBM Cloud initially dispatched. We liked the adaptability and versatility that IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service give us. Since we are tiny, the Kubernetes administration is just utilized at present inside my venture bunch.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
We actually haven't had any real problems in our clusters recently and the results we have gotten from adopting IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service have been beyond even our greatest expectations. The community has helped optimize the use of the system and make it relatively simpler to use.
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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.
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Reliability and Availability
IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
IBM's cloud has a site in my conuntry (MEXICO) so the network latency was almost 0
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
The self-guided support was solid, and there are plenty of online videos to guide first time users, but I think one area of improvement is a faster way to transfer a large quantity of files from our local machine to the cloud for storage (Aspera)
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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.
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Online Training
Online training is really an important resource for using these tools. IBM's help center is rich in useful information and tips. Also, external guides and tutorials are available (e.g. on youtube), but I followed only IBM ones and I had no difficulties.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Ease of use. Very intuitive. We have been looking for a product that allows us to orchestrate our docker containers in a way where it allows us to effectively scale our applications to production. It also provides us a way of monitoring all our infrastructure in a very clear concise way.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
I have earlier used various services, such as Kubernetes and Google Cloud Run. Still, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service offers more convenience and a larger set of functions and features are available in Kubernetes. Google Cloud Run is much closer to a server less approach to deployment, although it gives slightly less flexibility in terms of configuration than IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.
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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.
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Scalability
IBM's CKS does not offers automatic autoscaling nor vertical scaling (automatic). Other services like Google Kubernetes Engine scales up and down very well
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • IKS can provide around 30% savings when it comes to operational costs since Kubernetes is designed to run applications in most machines in the most efficient manner possible.
  • Managed Kubernetes can save a company time by 45% since Managed Kubernetes usually is seamlessly updated, without any interruptions with the workload. IKS fall into this benefit.
  • We heard people had saved in maintenance downtimes when it comes to Kubernetes by a factor of 10 so IKS can contribute to more flexible and distributed services with virtually no downtime.
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  • 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
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ScreenShots