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This article is to share with you the content of a sample analysis of the Rancher open source Fleet project. The editor thinks it is very practical, so share it with you as a reference and follow the editor to have a look.

Rancher is the earliest enterprise-level Kubernetes management platform in the industry to achieve multi-cloud and multi-cluster management. As early as the 2016 version of Rancher 1.0, Rancher already provided a central control plane for managing multiple clusters. As a pioneer of Kubernetes multi-cluster management, we have seen first-hand how users continue to increase the number of clusters managed.

In 2019, Rancher launched a series of lightweight Kubernetes open source projects, including lightweight Kubernetes distribution K3s, Kubernetes-based application deployment engine Rio, and the industry's first Kubernetes operating system K3OS. These projects have attracted the attention of a large number of users and received consistent praise. With the success of these projects, users began to deploy thousands of independent Kubernetes clusters to marginal locations such as branch offices, retail stores, oil rigs and wind farms.

Darren Shepherd, co-founder and chief architect of Rancher, who founded and led the Fleet project, said: "users have a great interest in managing thousands or even millions of clusters in the near future. We firmly believe that Kubernetes is expected to become a ubiquitous enterprise computing platform in cloudy and heterogeneous IT environments, and the need to manage Kubernetes clusters on a large scale will continue to grow."

Fleet: from "pet" to "herd" to meet the growing needs of cluster size management

With the growing demand for the scale of Kubernetes clusters, users need a new architecture that can achieve multi-cluster management. Fleet shows the future development of multi-cluster management. In the past, users regarded Kubernetes clusters as "pets". The emergence of Fleet will help users make the transition from managing "pets" to managing "cattle", thus realizing the centralized management of massive clusters.

In order to expand the number of clusters managed, users can not focus too much attention and energy on managing each independent cluster. Just as Kubernetes helps users shift focus away from a single computing node, Fleet draws on this idea to help users shift focus away from a single cluster.

"according to the Kubernetes deployment Pod model, we defined the Bundles and associated the Bundles to the cluster through Selector. However, we cannot completely replicate the Kubernetes Pod deployment model." Darren Shepherd explains: "what is unique about the idea of cross-cluster deployment is that each cluster requires a different configuration of resources."

Fleet provides a built-in mechanism to customize Bundles for each target cluster using industry standard tools such as Helm and Kustomize. Once users deploy Bundles,Fleet between clusters, they proactively monitor whether resources are ready and whether they have been changed.

Build on K3s and Rancher

The scalability of Fleet comes from a lot of work and experience accumulated by Rancher Labs for the extension of Rancher and K3s. Although K3s is aimed at smaller deployments, its storage technology allows Kubernetes to manage larger datasets than when using etcd. In addition, K3s is also optimized to reduce unnecessary communication in the Kubernetes controller.

A few days ago, Rancher officially released Rancher 2.4. its GA version supports 2000 clusters and 100000 nodes. With the enhancement of the Rancher 2.4 product architecture, Rancher will provide a way to support 1 million clusters in subsequent releases. "We are confident that the new generation architecture will enable us to manage millions of clusters. We will continue to validate this architecture and continue to scale testing, and we will share our findings with the community." Darren Shepherd added.

"We prefer to refer to the unit deployed by Fleet as Bundles rather than applications." Darren Shepherd stressed: "We can not only manage application deployment. More crucially, we can manage everything that can be described as Kubernetes resources."

This trend coincides with the current development trend of Kubernetes. As more and more Kubernetes native tools emerge in the industry, this greatly expands the scope that Fleet can manage.

Currently, in addition to application deployment, the main use case for Fleet is to manage security tools and security policies. Tools such as OPA and Falco all support native Kubernetes API, so Fleet ensures consistency and security across all your clusters.

Not only that, we have been working hard to enhance our K3s, K3OS and system upgrade controller (System Update Controller). These tools enable us to use Kubernetes resource files to manage the underlying cluster and operating systems.

Fleet Management: new scene spawns New demand

Since the introduction of K3s, more and more users have promoted it and applied it to distributed scenarios. Rancher R & D team has received numerous requirements for mass cluster management from K3s community users. In the end, Rancher decided to name the project Fleet because the word best embodies the essence of the use cases described by many users.

On the other hand, users who have worked deeply in the container field for several years may find that Fleet is also the name of another early container domain project. It is an early container orchestration system built by the CoreOS team and has now been discontinued and not updated.

"I have always been a big fan of it, and it is selfish of me to name this project Fleet." Darren Shepherd explained: "so I want to use the name Fleet again, which is a tribute to this excellent early project in the container field. At the same time, we are very excited and looking forward to driving the evolution of Kubernetes cluster management."

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