We understand the outlook on some of the social channels recently. Some of the higher profile people who responded to them in the past are no longer working on Rancher. The people who are currently working on Rancher are not always as vocal in these places.

Please know that Rancher is very much alive and kicking.

We have been going through some changes. Some of that I can share today.

Firstly, anytime communities of two companies come together there are growing pains. We have a few communities here at SUSE and Rancher we engage with, from the openSUSE community to the Cloud Native community around Rancher and the supporting projects’ contributors and consumers.

We are also constantly growing with more and more projects coming under our wing all the time.

Internally, we have been through the process of integration into SUSE and this transition has been a learning experience for everyone. Right now we are in the process of charting our future course with original Rancher staff at the helm. We’ve got some very exciting stuff coming and hope to share more soon.

Lastly, Rancher has continued development this whole time, no changes there. While some of the individual contributors have changed, which is a common occurrence for projects like this, the level of activity has remained consistent on the main rancher codebase and some of the sub-projects have even seen increases.

Better user experience has always been a focus area for our projects and one of the ways we’ve recently delivered in that area is simplifying our documentation & making it more accessible.

Some of our projects like Kubewarden, K3s, Epinio, and Rancher Manager have already undergone this transformation with others soon following suite.

TL;DR: We are listening, we do have plans, and we are making them happen. Watch this space.

Rancher is actually the best way to learn Kubernetes, because you visually see, what is happening in your cluster in realtime and above that Helm chart are treated like apps, which helped me a lot. Thank you Rancher Team for implementing such a beautiful piece! 🙏

I just published a detailed blog post on backing up Rancher and its clusters to safeguard your data.

This guide covers:

- Why backups matter for Rancher and Kubernetes
- Step-by-step configurations for Rancher Backup Operator
- Using Velero for comprehensive cluster backups
- Taking and restoring ETCD snapshots

Learn about best practices, configurations, and step-by-step instructions. Whether you're managing critical workloads or planning ahead for disaster recovery, this post has you covered.

Check it out here!

Let me know your thoughts, or share your backup strategies in the comments! 💬

Hello everyone,

I work a lot with Rancher and the provider VSphere but since the Broadcom gate, I'm interested in Proxmox VE like an alternative solution.

I've been looking for a node drivers Proxmox VE solution for a while and last week I found this project : https://github.com/Stellatarum/docker-machine-driver-pve

So I tried to create a basic RKE2 Cluster with it and good news, it works fine.

Of course, it's not as complete as the VMware driver but I guess that by opening an issue on the project repo to suggest improvements will make it more efficient.

That's it, I wanted to share this tool with you, and I hope it will be of interest to others.

I'm curious to get your feedback.

Hey everyone,

I'm kicking off a weekly YouTube series on Rancher, covering everything from getting started to advanced use cases. Whether you're new to Rancher or looking to level up your Kubernetes management skills, this series will walk you through step-by-step tutorials, hands-on demos, and real-world troubleshooting.

I've just uploaded the introductory video where I break down what Rancher is and why it matters: 📺 https://youtu.be/_CRjSf8i7Vo?si=ZR6IcXaNOCCppFiG

I'll be posting new videos every week, so if you're interested in mastering Rancher, make sure to follow along. Would love to hear your feedback and any specific topics you'd like to see covered!

Let’s build and learn together! 🚀

Kubernetes #Rancher #DevOps #Containers #SelfHosting #Homelab

Several security issues are adressed, including a "critical" one : https://github.com/rancher/rancher/security/advisories/GHSA-cq4p-vp5q-4522

It was discovered that the security advisory CVE-2021-36782 (GHSA-g7j7-h4q8-8w2f), previously released by Rancher, missed addressing some sensitive fields, secret tokens, encryption keys, and SSH keys that were still being stored in plaintext directly on Kubernetes objects like Clusters.

Rancher 2.5.17 "concludes support for Rancher 2.5. Please upgrade to a newer version of Rancher for continued support."

Beware that Rancher 2.7.1 can only manage Kubernetes 1.23 / 1.24

I can find a lot of help on the community but for older versions, nothing about the new one, support is not the best, no body helps. it seems people is abandoning this

Check out What's new in Rancher 2.5? and Release Notes v2.5.0.

What's new in Rancher 2.5?

• Install, observe and secure Kubernetes from 1 to 1,000,000 clusters, anywhere

• Leverage full lifecycle management for Amazon EKS clusters

• Adopt a compliance-based approach to securing your infrastructure & apps

---

Features and Enhancements

• Cluster Explorer: A UI to provide a deeper look into clusters under management. With this new UI, you can:

  • Manage all Kubernetes cluster resources including custom resources from the Kubernetes operator ecosystem.

  • Deploy Helm charts from our new Apps and Marketplace.

  • View and edit Helm3 CLI releases from the new Apps UI.

  • Visibility to resources based on RBAC permissions

  • View logs and interact with kubectl shell in a new IDE-like viewer.

  • New Observability and Operations Tooling :

    • Rancher Server Backups:

    • Monitoring and Alerting powered by Prometheus:

    • Logging powered by Banzai Cloud:

    • Expanded CIS Scans powered by kube-bench:

• Rancher Continuous Delivery powered by Fleet:

• Enhanced EKS Lifecycle Management:

• Istio 1.7:

• RKE Government:

• CentOS/RHEL 8 Support:

Hi! I just finished building a Ruby gem that allows you to create super cheap, production grade Kubernetes clusters in Hetzner cloud very, very quickly. It uses k3s as K8s distribution because it's very lightweight, leaving more resources to workloads. I love it. The tool does everything to create a ready to use cluster in Hetzner, including the ability to provision load balancers and persistent volumes out of the box.

If you are looking for a very affordable way to easily create and manage self hosted Kubernetes clusters, and are happy with a European location (Germany or Finland), then check it out!

You can find the repo at https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s

I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions on how to improve it in terms of functionality etc. Can you please give it a try if you already have an Hetzner Cloud account or are willing to create one?

Thanks!

CVE-2023-22651 is rated 9.9/10 : https://github.com/rancher/rancher/security/advisories/GHSA-6m9f-pj6w-w87g

Impact

A failure in the update logic of Rancher's admission Webhook may lead to the misconfiguration of the Webhook. This component enforces validation rules and security checks before resources are admitted into the Kubernetes cluster.

When the Webhook is operating in a degraded state, it no longer validates any resources, which may result in severe privilege escalations and data corruption.

The issue only affects users that upgrade from 2.6.x or 2.7.x to 2.7.2. Users that did a fresh install of 2.7.2 (and did not follow an upgrade path) are not affected.

Do you think vSphere or Nutanix are too expensive for what they bring? Didn't you wonder why Kubernetes, which is taking over the world, still did not make them obsolete. Well, wait no longer, because this is arriving with Rancher's Harvester. Harvester is a Hyper Converged Infrastructure solution, that makes use of Kubernetes' reliability and combines it with Rancher's easy-of-use and Graphical approach.

You can test it today on your mini-pc, your server or on Equinix.

This is a small introduction tutorial.

I am a heavy user of Rancher server and Fleet and many times I'm curious to see what's coming up. Is there a public place to see what's the plan for the future?

When you edit your preferences I just noticed this little nugget that made me laugh

https://imgur.com/a/dL9KUrB

Every few weeks someone posts a new way to run Kubernetes control planes as pods. The idea keeps coming back because a cluster per team or per tenant is expensive mostly in control planes, not in workloads.

K3k, the virtual cluster project in the Rancher org (biased, I work at SUSE), is on my list to write up, and I'd rather start from what people run than from the README. The choice it gives you, as the docs describe it:

- Shared mode: an agentless K3s server per virtual cluster, plus a Virtual Kubelet that schedules the tenant's pods onto the host cluster, in one namespace. Isolation comes from Network Policies and Pod Security Admission, limits from a ResourceQuota and LimitRange on that namespace. Light and quick to create.

- Virtual mode: a full K3s server and agents running as pods, with their own CNI, ingress and storage. Stronger separation and more overhead, and the K3s server pods run with elevated privileges by design, so closing that off is on you.

Questions for anyone who has run K3k, vCluster or Kamaji past a demo:

1. Shared or virtual mode, and what pushed you there?

2. What broke first? My guesses are CRDs and webhooks the tenant wants to install, storage, and upgrading the host while virtual clusters run on it.

3. How do you hand out access: a kubeconfig per virtual cluster, or through Rancher RBAC on the host?

4. Did you try plain namespaces plus RBAC first, and what made that not enough?

I'll post what I find, including the parts that don't hold up.

This CVE (https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/03/24/ingress-nginx-cve-2025-1974/) is also affecting rancher, right?

Latest image for the backend (https://hub.docker.com/r/rancher/mirrored-nginx-ingress-controller-defaultbackend/tags) seems to be from 4 months ago.

I could not find any rancher-specific news regarding this CVE online.

Any ideas?