Rancher on Danilo Falcão da Silva

Rancher vs Lens: A Platform and a Dashboard, Not the Same Thing

Wed, 20 May 2026 21:15:00 -0300

You’ll see this comparison on r/kubernetes every couple of months, phrased as if it’s a real choice: Rancher or Lens? The framing is wrong. They occupy different layers of the stack. Asking which one “wins” is like asking whether VS Code beats Kubernetes.

But the question keeps coming up — usually from someone who has Lens installed, has heard about Rancher, and is trying to figure out whether they should swap. So let me lay out what each one actually is, where they overlap, where they don’t, and which one earns a place in a serious on-prem setup.

GitOps with Argo CD: The Reconciliation Loop That Survives 3 a.m.

Tue, 19 May 2026 13:30:00 -0300

Here’s the test I use for any deployment tooling:

It is 3 a.m. on a Sunday. PagerDuty just woke you up. A production service is degraded. You roll out of bed, open your laptop, and have to figure out what the cluster thinks is true, what’s actually true, and what changed in the last twelve hours. The faster you can answer those three questions, the better the tooling.

The right GitOps stack collapses all three questions into one dashboard. The wrong one has you SSH-hopping between five servers running kubectl rollout history against unlabeled deployments. I’ve done both. I’m writing this post about the former.

RKE2 Deserves Some Love: Why It's My On-Prem Kubernetes Pick

Tue, 19 May 2026 12:30:00 -0300

Most of the Kubernetes conversation in 2026 happens around managed services — EKS, GKE, AKS — and most of the rest happens around K3s for edge and homelab. Somewhere in the middle, on the hardware that lives in a rack in a datacenter you can drive to, there’s a Kubernetes story that nobody talks about loudly enough.

That story is RKE2 — the Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2, SUSE’s hardened, security-focused, single-binary distribution designed for on-premises production. I’ve been running it for two years across two different employers and one home lab, and it’s the rare piece of infrastructure that gets more impressive the longer you live with it.