Introducing Spot and Stateful Namespaces on RSaaS — Rancher Shared as a Service — on Auto-Pilot

We launched our Rancher Shared and Dedicated as a Service offering some weeks ago to help individuals and small companies to get started with Rancher Management Server to build their own Kubernetes Platform without having to deal with the Rancher installation, maintenance or upgrade, and the best thing is, it is for free for everyone, forever!

With RSaaS — Rancher Shared as a Service — you can get instant access to a shared carefree Rancher Server with a free namespace to deploy your apps or to create new or import existing Kubernetes clusters within minutes.

With RSaaS we hope to boost up the developer productivity through a zero touch experience and engage users to build their own Kubernetes platform with Rancher everywhere.

With RDaaS — Rancher Dedicated as a Service — small to midsize companies can get access to a full-managed AWS account and an EKS cluster through a dedicated, high available Rancher Management Server running on RKE with Auto Scaling Support for Spot Instances, which helps to reduce their cloud costs by up to 90% and save our climate and planet, since wasting your money means hurting our climate!

If you’re going to use RSaaS for development, you can import your local minikube, k3d or k3sup made k3s, kind or whatever cluster like AKS, EKS or GKE into Rancher or create a Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) cluster on your local machine or on other existing infrastructure through Rancher.

But with RSaaS we are introducing Spot and Stateful Namespaces to help developers and small businesses to get instant access to one or more namespaces in a project in Rancher. With that we are introducing the Cloudless paradigm, where you can use the cloud without having direct access to the cloud and the need to provision the infrastructure and deal with security, hardening, patching, etc.

Introducing Spot Namespaces

Inspired from AWS Spot Instances which we are using heavily on most of our managed Kubernetes clusters, we are introducing Spot Namespaces. A Spot Namespace is an ephemeral namespace which RSaaS users can use for a certain time, depending on the capacity and load of the Kubernetes clusters like EKS and soon GKE which are integrated into RSaaS with dynamic quotas. Spot Namespaces could last for a day, week or forever, depending on the utilisation of the namespace. Idle namespaces will get purged to save resources and provide the freed-up resources to other namespaces which have a higher utilisation need.

Since RSaaS with Spot Namespaces are a no-cost and free offering, we had to see how we could finance the whole service without having to get bankrupted. The idea is to provide low-cost namespaces which are Stateful and do persist as long you want.

Stateful Namespaces coming soon

A Stateful namespace is a low-cost namespace which won’t get purged and will get charged based on the desired quota which the user can define in our backend environment in the near future. With Stateful Namespaces users can apply to get their own On-Demand or Reserved Instances.

Now that you have an idea about RSaaS with Spot and Stateful Namespaces, we hope you’re ready to get started with RSaaS.

Get Instant Access to RSaaS

Getting instant access to Rancher is a matter of providing your name and email and clicking the Sign Up button. You’ll receive an email with an initial password to get started immediately.

Here is a short video recording about how the registration process and the instant access to RSaaS might work for you.

FAQs

How do I get access to a Spot Namespace?

After the initial registration, you’ll get access to a project in the form of <user-id>-project-spot-namespace and you can create a namespace in this project.

Do I get informed before the Spot Namespace is purged?

Yes, the system informs you before the resources in your namespace is purged.

How many Namespaces can I use?

The number of namespaces within a project is unlimited.

How much quota can I use with a Spot Namespace?

Each namespace has by default a single KU (kube unit) of 0.5 vCPU and 512 MB Memory assigned.

How much does a Stateful Namespace cost?

A Stateful Namespace with a single KU (kube unit) of 0.5 vCPU and 512 MB Memory and 1 GB storage will cost probably about €10–€20.

Can I change the type of my Spot Namespace to a Stateful Namespace?

Yes, you need to apply for the change. In the future, users will be able to change the type of their namespace in the backend interface.

How are Stateful Namespaces charged and what does it cost?

Stateful Namespaces are charged depending on the requested quota and reserved resources monthly.

How secure and isolated are the namespaces?

We are implementing our own hard multi-tenancy implementation for namespaces, but don’t guarantee any security breaches. Using a shared environment is always at your own risk. Although we have done our best to provide the best isolation possible.

Can I provision a managed hosted cluster like AKS, EKS or GCP?

Yes, but we don’t recommend doing it in a shared environment.

Can I change from RSaaS to RDaaS?

Sure, we’ll create a new account with the same user to your RDaaS environment, where you’ll have full-admin privileges.

Can I use On-Demand Instances with RSaaS?

Yes, you can get your own On-Demand instance, if you’re using Stateful Namespaces.

Can I use Reserved Instances?

Yes, but you should extend your contract for at least 1 year.

Can I use Auto Scaling with On-Demand Instances?

Not yet, but in the future you can configure the type of the instance in the backend interface and the system will provision the instance for you.

Can I choose the Cloud Provider where my workloads shall run?

Not yet, but we are planning to support GCP and Azure in addition to AWS.

How does the support process work?

Paid accounts which are using Stateful Namespaces have access to our service desk. Spot Namespace users can get support through our public Kubernauts Slack in the #rsaas-support channel.

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Free Kubernetes Namespaces for Everyone was originally published in Kubernauts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mehr zu Kubernetes Services, Kubernetes Training und Rancher dedicated as a Service lesen unter https://blog.kubernauts.io/free-kubernetes-namespaces-for-everyone-80d721ad1882?source=rss—-d831ce817894—4