TechOps Examples
Hey — It's Govardhana MK 👋
Welcome to another technical edition.
Every Tuesday – You’ll receive a free edition with a byte-size use case, remote job opportunities, top news, tools, and articles.
Every Thursday and Saturday – You’ll receive a special edition with a deep dive use case, remote job opportunities, and articles.
Top engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI say AI now writes 100% of their code.
If you're not using AI, you're spending 40 hours doing what they do in 4.
These 100+ Claude Code hacks fix that and help you ship 10x faster.
Sign up for The Code and get:
100+ Claude Code hacks used by top engineers — free
The Code newsletter — learn the latest AI tools, tips, and skills to code faster with AI in 5 minutes a day
👀 Remote Jobs
Binance is hiring a DevOps Engineer, Cloud Infra
Remote Location: Asia
Canonical is hiring a Cloud Solutions Architect
Remote Location: Worldwide
📚 Resources
Looking to promote your company, product, service, or event to 50,000+ Cloud Native Professionals? Let's work together. Advertise With Us
🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE
Kubernetes Multi Cluster GitOps Architecture Explained
Managing Kubernetes across multiple clouds is often complex. Each environment has its own access controls, networking rules, and upgrade process. Rancher solves this by providing a single platform to deploy, manage, and secure Kubernetes clusters anywhere. Rancher solves this.
What is Rancher?
Rancher is a complete container management platform built to manage Kubernetes clusters at scale. It acts as a central control layer to import existing clusters, create new ones, and apply consistent access controls and security policies across environments.
It also integrates with CI/CD, GitOps, and monitoring systems, supporting Kubernetes distributions like RKE, RKE2, K3s, EKS, AKS, and GKE for flexible workload management across any cloud or on prem setup.
What is Rancher Controller?
Rancher uses a controller based design to manage and automate cluster operations. The controller continuously watches the state of clusters and applies the required configurations defined in plans.
For every node that matches the plan, the controller schedules a one time Job on that node. The job runs the action install, upgrade, rotate certificates, or configure components and then reports completion. The controller keeps reconciling until all targeted nodes have finished, which keeps the cluster in the desired state.
A typical Rancher workflow in a Kubernetes environment looks like this:
1. Rancher Server Layer
The Rancher Server acts as the management hub.
Authentication Proxy validates user access from
kubectlor the Rancher UI.Once authenticated, the request is routed to the correct Cluster Controller, which manages operations for a specific target cluster.
The server establishes a tunnel connection to each managed cluster for secure and persistent communication.
2. Managed Cluster Layer
Every cluster has a Cluster Agent deployed by Rancher during registration or provisioning.
The agent communicates with the Rancher Server through the tunnel and syncs the cluster state.
It interacts with the kube-api-auth component for validating API requests and permissions.
3. Node Communication Layer
Inside each cluster, Node Agents are deployed on every node (control plane, worker, and etcd).
These agents work with the API Server and kubelet to execute Rancher-initiated tasks such as upgrades, node registration, and health reporting.
Node Agents continuously report back to the Cluster Agent, which relays status updates to the Rancher Server.
Cluster Agents and Node Agents handle execution inside the cluster.
Rancher only coordinates while Kubernetes components perform the actual scheduling and workload management.
With this basic understanding, let us visually look at how Rancher architecture and design nuances work in a multi cloud GitOps Kubernetes management environment.
🔴 Get my DevOps & Kubernetes ebooks! (free for Premium Club and Personal Tier newsletter subscribers)
Upgrade to Paid to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content.
UpgradePaid subscriptions get you:
- Access to archive of 250+ use cases
- Deep Dive use case editions (Thursdays and Saturdays)
- Access to Private Discord Community
- Invitations to monthly Zoom calls for use case discussions and industry leaders meetups
- Quarterly 1:1 'Ask Me Anything' power session
