Part 1 – From the beginning to Rancher 1
In Uala we always try to use last tecnologies in every part of our platform, from the Backend to the Frontend, and of course also on our Infrastructure.
About 5 years ago, when Docker started to be stable enough for create services able to be deployed everywhere we immediately wanted to try it.
We started with Dokku, a simple tool that do a basic work for put online a container, and after some weeks we was online with the first dockerized version of our Frontend.
From there, about 1 year later, we decided to create a dockerized version of our Backend and move it from Heroku to dedicated servers.
Why dedicated servers? Well, they were cheap, and we were a little startup with very low budget for the infrastructure.
We bought 3 servers, but Dokku was not able to manage multiple hosts easly so we started searching for a tool that allow us to configure and deploy in production multiple apps without warries about servers (well, more or less).
In that year, Kubernetes was just at the beginning, and breaking changes were very important at every release, so I was not sure if it was the perfect tool to start with our private infrastructure.
After some days of search, I found Rancher.
It was at the first “stable” release, and it allowed to do all what we dreamed: add a new server, press a button and be online with our services.
After 4 years, our little startup growed from 10 people to 150+, our clients from 150 to 10.000+, our dedicated servers from 3 to 25, and… we are still with Rancher 1.
