---
title: "Rancher, why this is another take on the container trend"
description: "Rancher, why this is another take on the container trend"
date: 2015-08-25
author: "Antoine Coetsier"
url: https://www.exoscale.com/blog/rancher-integration/
---
# Rancher, why this is another take on the container trend

In case you have not noticed, containers and [Docker](https://www.docker.com/) is
on every vendor, provider or system integrator communication lately. Maybe it is even
going to catch up with the cloud hype that started circa 2009:

![docker and cloud Google trends](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/rancher-integration/docker-vs-cloud-trends.png)

* Red: Cloud computing
* Blue: Docker

__source:__ *Google trends August 12th, 2015*

At least the ramp up since 2014 is clearly here and the slope similar to that of
cloud computing. Naturally, just like when cloud computing started booming, many
venture in the sector bringing alternatives, variants or new ideas to the domain.

### Introducing Rancher

Amongst them on this container initiative, is [Rancher](https://www.rancher.com/).
The Rancher Labs team behind it is not new in the field, in fact they played the
game before rather quite successfully, as Shannon Williams and Darren Shepherd
were also in the cloud computing vessel when it launched. They initiated Cloud.com
the company behind what is now the most mature orchestration tool for
infrastructure: [Apache Cloudstack](https://cloudstack.apache.org).

They set out to build what is apparently 2 products:

* Rancher: an infrastructure platform to run Docker in production
* RancherOS: a minimalist OS to run Docker

#### Rancher

Rancher is all about managing more than one container which is the
obvious deployment scenario when shooting for a micro services architecture.
With Rancher, you get in fact several components:

* A user interface: that help you visualize your containers
and the infrastructure they are running onto.
* An orchestration engine (Cattle): that will take care of deploying
and managing workloads across a potentially heterogeneous infrastructure.


![rancher global dashboard](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/rancher-integration/rancher-dashboard.png)

#### More than a deployment tool

The difference with other initiatives is that this is only the tip
of the iceberg. Orchestration and user interface are the "easy" parts
when talking containers. Do not mistake me when I say easy, what
Rancher is today is quite an achievement but the sum of innovation
is fairly low, and the success is more in the right combination
of components.

Where Rancher stands out is when it comes to solving the uneasy parts
of the equation like:

* Networking
* Storage

Instead of building their engine on top of different technologies, Rancher
integrates its own layers on non trivial parts such as network between
containers. While solving these problems, Rancher strictly complies with
the Docker API all the way. This means that even if you use Rancher
you can still interface with Docker and Rancher will notice instead of giving
up on you.

### Rancher and Exoscale

This rather long introduction for Rancher leads us to an integration
between Rancher and Exoscale. With the latest builds or source from
[Github](https://github.com/rancher/rancher) you can now build your container
hosting infrastructure completely or partly on top of Exoscale. This integration,
because Rancher uses standard interfaces, was done with minimum efforts
from both companies: [Docker Machine](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/deploy-docker-swarm/)
had already support for Exoscale compute which eased the process
greatly.

![rancher deploy with Exoscale](https://www.exoscale.com/blog/rancher-integration/rancher-exoscale.png)

#### Looking ahead

There seems to be a good foundation here for great integrations to come.
For example, as we are ourselves moving more and more forward with the use
of [Apache Mesos](https://mesos.apache.org/) at least for internal workloads,
there are hints of successful combination of Mesos and Rancher. Both implementations
of a Mesos executor and most importantly scheduler are being worked
on which could help tremendously managing all these moving parts.