Rancher Labs is an open source software company based in

Cupertino, California Cupertino ( ) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 57,8 ...

. The company helps manage

Kubernetes Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintains ...

at scale. Rancher Labs was founded in 2014 and has 30,000 active teams. Rancher Labs was funded with $10 million in 2015, $20 million in 2016, and $40 million in 2020. Executives include co-founders

Sheng Liang Sheng Liang is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rancher Labs. Previously he was the lead developer on the original Java virtual machine (JVM) team at Sun Microsystems, Inc., and the chief technology officer of the Cloud Platforms groups at Citrix Sy ...

(CEO), Shannon Williams, Darren Shepherd, and Will Chan. The company's headquarters are in

. In May 2020, Rancher Labs launched Rancher Academy, a free training program through which IT professionals can be certified on a range of technologies the company provides on top of various distributions of Kubernetes. Company President Shannon Williams says Rancher Labs is trying to democratize access to Kubernetes training at a time when many IT organizations still can’t find IT staff with appropriate skills, even in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. A recently released Dice 2020 Tech Job Report found there has been an 82% increase in job demand for individuals with Kubernetes skills over the past year alone. Dice predicts that the demand for Kubernetes skills will enjoy a projected growth rate of more than 67% over the next 10 years. In April 2020, Rancher Labs released an update to its Kubernetes management platform that makes it easier to upgrade without any downtime in addition to making it easier to remotely access. Company CEO Sheng Liang says that as organizations increasingly operationalize Kubernetes there is now a lot more focus on lifecycle management and scalability. Version 2.4 of Rancher provides access to a set of tools that makes it easier for IT teams to manage a fleet of Kubernetes clusters even when network connectivity is limited, says Liang. IT teams can now, for example, initiate an upgrade remotely, but all processes are executed locally. Once completed, the remote cluster synchronizes with the management server once connectivity is re-established. In July 2020, Rancher Labs announced its definitive agreement to be acquired by

SUSE SUSE ( , ) is a German-based multinational open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers. Founded in 1992, it was the first company to market Linux for enterprise. It is the developer of SUSE Linux Ent ...

. The deal closed on December 1, 2020.

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External links

* * {{Linux containers Linux containerization Linux distributions