How to Install Rancher on Ubuntu?

Since its inception, Kubernetes has resolved innumerable issues regarding effective management tactics for their cloud cluster storage. Due to its huge user base, the Kubernetes market should expand by over 4.3 billion USD by next year. Such an expansion would make it more than 2x as regards to its present value.

These numbers and the growth potential shows how much people are fond of the K8s technology. But sometimes, it becomes tricky to pick the right Kubernetes solution. That’s where Rancher comes in. It is, no doubt, one of the best open-source tools among the leading Kubernetes (K8s) solutions today. This article aims to discuss with you all the essential steps to install Rancher on Ubuntu with relative ease.

What Exactly is Rancher?

Before explaining the steps you have to follow to install Rancher on Ubuntu, let’s first understand what Rancher is. Well, Rancher is a wonderful invention arising out of the rapid growth of technology. Released in 2016, it is a great open-source tool for empowering companies for running containers in production. With Rancher coming to their aid, companies can ditch the need for manually constructing a container services platform. Rancher provides users with the complete software stack that they can utilize for managing their containers in production.

Let us now shift our focus to its four chief components:

1. Infrastructure orchestration

The first of its quartet of the major components is infrastructure orchestration. Rancher grasps raw computing resources from a public/private cloud. These resources come as Linux hosts. Each of such Linux hosts can either be a virtual or a physical apparatus. Plus, Rancher is also not very demanding. All it takes from the hosts is their CPU power, memory, and network connections. For Rancher, virtual machine (VM) instances of cloud service providers and bare-metal servers situated at the colocation sites are self-same.

The software also utilizes a portable infrastructure services layer specifically intended for powering containerized apps. A user gets infrastructure services like storage, DNS, networking, security, and so on from Rancher. These services get deployed as self-sufficient containers themselves, enabling them to run on all Linux hosts, regardless of the cloud.

2. Container orchestration and scheduling

The next component is the mechanism to orchestrate and schedule containers. A shedload of individuals prefers to run containerized apps via a container orchestration and scheduling foundation. For such users, Rancher incorporates an allocation of all the well-known container orchestration and scheduling frameworks out there. These include Mesos and Kubernetes among others. A single user can generate numerous Mesos or Kubernetes clusters. Rancher empowers its users to utilize their native Mesos or Kubernetes tools for managing their containerized apps.

Besides supporting Mesos, Kubernetes, etc., Rancher gives its users the ability to use a homegrown container orchestration and scheduling system known as Cattle. While initially Cattle was intended to be a Docker Swarm extension, today, it has become its own independent entity. It occurred as a result of the rapid development of Swarm and its digression from Cattle in the following years. Cattle helps Rancher immensely to configure, manage, and upgrade Mesos, Kubernetes, and Docker Swarm cultures.

3. App catalog

The third among Rancher components is its app catalog. The application catalog enables Rancher users to deploy any of their multi-container clustered apps with a single click. Just imagine how convenient and effortless that is. Users also become capable of managing the apps they’ve deployed and put them through auto-upgrades whenever a new edition of an app is out. Rancher offers a public catalog comprising all the famed apps the Rancher community has shared. Nonetheless, one is free to make their own private catalog if they want to.

4. Enterprise-grade control

The fourth and last component of Rancher is its enterprise-grade control. The software suits many user-authentication plug-ins. Plus, it has its own inbuilt authentication integration equipped with GitHub, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, and AD. It also provides support for RBAC at its environment levels, enabling individuals and teams to give/decline ingress to deployment environments such as production and development.

Why Should You Install Rancher on Ubuntu Anyway?

Now you might think about what is the need for installing Rancher. Well, Rancher is known for offering several benefits to its users with some of them mentioned as follows:

Rancher’s foremost perk is its cross-host networking. No matter what your environment is, Rancher will construct a relevant private network described by software. This, in turn, leads to a safe interaction between different containers residing on different clouds/hosts.
The next benefit that Rancher has to offer is its container load balancing. The Rancher software provides every user with a coalescent and flexible load balancing service that functions on numerous clouds. This service helps them to dispense traffic across services/containers with ease.
Service discovery is yet another benefit offered by Rancher. It incorporates an inbuilt DNS-based service discovery feature equipped with a health checkup facility. This function empowers containers for auto-enrolling themselves as services. Plus, it enables those services to find other similar services on the network.
Effective resource management is also a stronghold of Rancher. The software provides support for Docker Machine. As some of you might know, Docker Machine is an amazing tool to perform host provisioning from CSP, ditching the need for a go-between. After the completion of the said provisioning, Rancher starts focusing on host resource overseeing and container deployment management.
As we said earlier, Rancher supports a plethora of container orchestration engines, including Mesos and Kubernetes. Besides that, it has its own orchestration engine, namely Cattle. The facility of using an engine of choice allows users to pick the popular orchestration engines out there. Plus, it also opens the door for enhancing Rancher features such as storage technologies, app catalog, and many more.
The Rancher software offers an effortless upgrade facility for the container services they possess via service cloning permission and service request diversion. Consequently, it helps to ensure the validation of the upgraded services by utilizing their dependencies prior to directing live traffic to those services.

Steps to Install Rancher on Ubuntu

In this section, we will discuss the steps that you need to follow for installing Rancher on your Ubuntu OS machine. But before talking about the steps, let’s take a look at the prerequisites for ensuring the successful installation of Rancher on Ubuntu OS.

Prerequisites

Two Ubuntu-installed servers
Two valid static IP addresses configured on each of the Rancher server and the client
A root password configured on both servers

Step 1: Update both servers

Before proceeding further, you have to update both of your Ubuntu-installed servers to their latest editions. Updating them is easy. Just execute the following command and that’s it:

apt-get update -y

apt-get upgrade -y

Once the update is finished, reboot both servers to implement your modifications.

Step 2: Install Docker CE

Next, you have to install Docker Community Edition (CE) on both of your servers. Typically, you won’t be able to find the latest version of Docker CE in your Ubuntu default repository. That’s why you need to add the necessary repository yourself.

For doing so, you must allow APT for utilizing a repository on HTTPS by installing some packages. Run the following commands in the terminal:

apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl

software-properties-common -y

After that, download the GPG key for Docker Community Edition and affix it using the below command:

wget https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg

apt-key add gpg

After completion, join APT and the Docker CE repository together with the following command:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list

Next, add this:

deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu xenial stable

Once you’re done adding the above line, save the file and quit.

Now, you got to update your repository using the below command:

apt-get update -y

Upon completion, the repository will receive an update.

Next, install Docker Community Edition/CE:

apt-get install docker-ce -y

After installing Docker CE, you’d be capable of verifying the status of your Docker service using this command:

systemctl status docker

If everything went correctly, you should receive the below output:

docker.service – Docker Application Container Engine

Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)

Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-06-06 21:16:14 IST; 1min 0s ago

Docs: https://docs.docker.com

Main PID: 14498 (dockerd)

CGroup: /system.slice/docker.service

└─14498 /usr/bin/dockerd -H unix://