Releases: rancher/docs
Rancher v2.4.0
The documentation release for Rancher v2.3.0 adds the documentation for new Rancher features.
- CIS Scanning: Ensuring continuous CIS compliance is now possible directly in Rancher. Rancher operators can perform CIS scans of RKE clusters ad-hoc or on regularly scheduled intervals. Operators can see the history of compliance scans and produce a report for auditors. Continuously scanning clusters on an interval, an operator can be notified when a configuration drift is detected. The scans are customizable through configuration so that tests can be skipped if a control does not apply to your installation.
- Scale improvements: Rancher control plane now manages up to 2,000 clusters or 100,000 nodes. Rancher moved to a shared global context cluster state, reducing the memory footprint and Kubernetes API connections needed to manage each cluster. Rancher controllers were optimized to reduce the overall number of calls to the Kubernetes API. Based on these improvements, new sizing guidelines have been provided for installing Rancher.
- Zero downtime upgrades: Updates to RKE clusters can now be made without impacting the availability of the Kubernetes API and user workloads. The upgrade process of the cluster control plane has been modified to update a single node at a time. The number of worker nodes that can be upgraded at a time is now user-configurable. For clusters that need maximum availability, a single node can be upgraded at a time. For those working with larger RKE clusters, the number can be scaled up so that upgrades can happen in a shorter timeframe.
- Atomic Cluster Rollbacks: Rancher now supports rolling back both the etcd database and the Kubernetes configuration in a single operation. This operation can be used mid-upgrade if there are problems/complications and the operator needs to revert to the last known state. During the rollback process, there are no availability guarantees.
- Upgrade K3s clusters from Rancher: Imported K3s clusters are now upgradeable from within Rancher. Rancher now detects that a K3s cluster has been imported and presents new options to the operator when editing the cluster. The option to select the Kubernetes version is now available, along with a read-only view of the configuration parameters of the server.
- Helm 3 support to catalogs: Rancher catalog now supports Helm 3 charts. An admin, cluster or project owner can add catalogs to use Helm 3 to deploy charts. Any existing catalogs will continue to use Helm 2 to deploy charts.
- K3s is a supported Rancher HA distribution: Rancher HA is now supports K3s as an underlying Kubernetes distribution. A Rancher admin can create a K3s cluster using managed MySQL service and stateless nodes to deploy Rancher management. The need to manage an etcd cluster is no longer necessary.
- Authentication and RBAC enhancements:
- Assign groups to global roles: Global roles in Rancher now support group assignments from your auth provider. Assigning groups, means administrators do not need to modify assignments as team members come and go within your organization.
- Customize global roles: The default behavior can now be customized for all users by creating global roles.
- Shibboleth as an auth provider: Shibboleth is now available as an authentication provider.
- Shibboleth and OpenLDAP: OpenLDAP can be configured with Shibboleth to provide searching for users and groups that a user is not a member of. Note: Users in within a nested group will not be provided the same privileges as the group added. For example, group A includes group B. The members in group B will not get the same privileges as group A.
- OPA Gatekeeper (Experimental): Rancher now provides experimental support for the Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper operator. Rancher will deploy and manage the installation and setup a validating webhook for the cluster. Admins can interact with the custom resources through the next-gen UI to define policies in the cluster and apply them to various namespaces as needed.
RKE Documentation Updates
- How Upgrades Work: In this section, you’ll learn what happens when you edit or upgrade your RKE Kubernetes cluster.
- Maintaining Availability for Applications During Upgrades: In this section, you’ll learn the requirements to prevent downtime for your applications when you upgrade the cluster using rke up.
- Configuring the Upgrade Strategy: Learn how to configure the maximum number of unavailable controlplane and worker nodes, how to drain nodes before upgrading them, and how to configure the replicas for addons such as Ingress.
Rancher v2.3 Documentation
The documentation release for Rancher v2.3.0 adds the documentation for new Rancher features.
Besides the new features, the documentation has updated its content/navigation with the intent to make it easier as a user.
| New Navigation | Former Navigation | General Content |
|---|---|---|
| Air Gap Install | Air Gap: Single Node Install/Air Gap: High Availability Install | Content for air gap installs is consolidated as setting up your private registry is the same for each. |
| Upgrades | - | Added content for known issues for upgrades and caveats as a reference for all upgrade scenarios. |
| Single Node Upgrades | Single Node Upgrade/Single Node Upgrade - Air Gap | Content for upgrading a single node install with specific instructions in the docs for an air gap setup. |
| High Availability (HA) Upgrade | High Availability (HA) Upgrade/High Availability (HA) Upgrade - Air Gap | Content for upgrading HA installs with specific instructions in the docs for an air gap setup. |
RKE Documentation Updates
RKE v0.3.0 was shipped, and the docs have been moved to not be version specific in the navigation. https://rancher.com/docs/rke/latest/en/
Rancher v2.2.0 Documentation
The documentation release for Rancher 2.2 adds the documentation for new Rancher features.
Besides the new features, the documentation has updated its navigation with the intent to make it easier as a user to find what can be done based on their role.
| New Navigation | Former Navigation | General Content |
|---|---|---|
| Global Configuration | Administration | Content for administrators of Rancher including authentication, rbac, pod security policies and provisioning drivers. |
| Cluster Administration | - | Content for cluster owners including how to access clusters, manage cluster membership, edit clusters, manage cluster level resources, configuring cluster level tools and manage cluster components. |
| Project Administration | - | Content for project owners including how to manage project membership, edit projects, resource quotas, manage namespaces and configure project level tools. |
| Working in Projects | Kubernetes in Rancher | Content for all users including how to deploy Kubernetes applications, create Kubernetes Resources and configure pipelines. |
| Catalogs and Apps | Catalogs and Charts | Content for how to manage catalogs, launching catalog applications, creating multi-cluster applications and creating global DNS entries. |
Another significant navigation change has been moving the information that was in "Rancher Tools" into the new cluster administration, project administration and working in projects sections. This change was made in order to clarify who has permissions to configure these tools.
RKE Documentation Updates
RKE v0.2.0 was shipped, but the docs still use rke/v0.1.x. For now, the notes for RKE v0.2.0 are embedded with notes in the v0.1.x docs.
Rancher 2.1 Documentation
The documentation release for Rancher 2.1 adds the following documentation for new Rancher features.
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Ability to Add Quotas to Projects:
The Resource Quota feature lets you limit the Kubernetes resources available (like CPU and memory) within projects and namespaces.
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The user experience for the pipelines feature has been improved for release v2.1.0. Pipelines also now offers support for GitLab in addition to GitHub.
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Support for Clusters using Windows Nodes Support:
Rancher v2.1.0 introduces support for Windows containers and Windows nodes.
Note: This feature is an experimental feature not yet officially supported by Rancher.
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You now have the ability to drain nodes in your clusters so that you can perform routine maintenence on your nodes without customers experiencing service interruption.
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Keycloak as an Authentication Provider
You can now enable Keycloak as an external authentication provider.
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API Audit Log for the Helm Chart Install:
When installing or upgrading Rancher, you can configure it to log all API requests and responses. Know who made what action and when. With 2.1, we've introduced the ability to turn this on for the HA helm chart install.
Additionally, there have been improvements of how to clean up Kubernetes clusters that have had Rancher deployed on it or have been deployed by Rancher.
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The system-tools utility removes any Rancher components installed on a Rancher Server node. Use this utility before reinstalling Rancher Server to clean up leftover components that may cause interference.
7/12 Documentation Release
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Storage Documentation
Instructions on how to setup:
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Project Resource Documentation
There's also new documentation on how to setup project resources.
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New Deployment Documentation
We've added new documentation for different types of deployments beyond standard deployments.
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Improved Documentation Linking
Many pages now feature a related links section at the bottom of the page.
Rancher 2.0 Documentation: 6/19 Update
Hi Fam,
We've made another drop to the Rancher 2.0 Documentation today.
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Cluster and Project Membership
These docs describe how to provide your users with access to Rancher clusters and project.
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These documents describe the concept of workloads in Rancher, along with instruction on how to work with workloads.
Rancher 2.0 Documentation: 6/18 Update
Howdy Folks! We've made the following updates to the Rancher 2.0 Documentation site over the weekend.
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Instructions on how to control your Rancher clusters using kubectl.
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Where to download Rancher CLI, how to install it, and basic usage.
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How to enable and use Helm chart catalogs in Rancher.