Rancher Labs, a container management platform that supports both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B round. This new funding round was led by new investor GRC SinoGreen, a Chinese private equity and venture capital fund, with participation from existing investors Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners. This round brings the company’s total funding to $30 million.
The company says it plans to use the new funding to increase its sales and marketing capabilities and “to keep pace with demand for the product.”
“Containerization has enabled organizations to do amazing things to improve application performance, availability and cost,”said Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang in today’s announcement. “The next piece of this puzzle, which will really help to perfect container technologies, are the tools around the management of containers. We are excited to continue efforts in furthering our goal of providing users with the right tools to take advantage of container technologies, and the financial and organizational benefits they promise.”
https://vimeo.com/160679346#at=0
The market for container platforms is starting to get a bit crowded, but Rancher Labs argues that the fact that it supports both Kubernetes and Docker Swarm makes it the right platform for enterprise container deployments. What’s maybe more important, though, is that it’s also cloud agnostic and allows enterprises to run containers in public and private clouds as well as in traditional data centers.
It’s also worth noting that Rancher is a multi-tenant platform, so teams can manage their own clusters according to their needs. The company argues that it only takes five minutes to set up a Kubernetes cluster this way, for example (though I would take this number with a grain of salt — especially if you’re deploying your first cluster).
To make deploying containers easy, the company also offers an application catalog that makes it almost trivial to configure and deploy relatively complex applications with just a few clicks.
“Containers are rapidly disrupting software development and IT operations” said Dr. James Zhang, partner at GRC SinoGreen, in today’s announcement. “Rancher Labs has shown through its amazing open-source adoption, that organizations see container management as critical to accelerating software development, and running applications reliably and efficiently in production.”