Rancher vs Vault: What are the differences?

Rancher vs Vault

Rancher and Vault are two popular tools in the world of DevOps and infrastructure management. While both help in managing and securing resources, they have some key differences that set them apart. Here are six key differences between Rancher and Vault:

1. Primary Functionality: Rancher is an open-source container management platform that helps in managing and orchestrating multiple container clusters. It simplifies the deployment, scaling, and monitoring of containers. On the other hand, Vault is a tool for securely storing and accessing secrets, such as passwords, API keys, and certificates. Its primary functionality is to securely manage and distribute secrets to authorized applications and users.

2. Scalability: Rancher is designed to scale horizontally to manage multiple clusters and thousands of containers. It provides features like load balancing and automatic scaling to handle large-scale deployments. Vault, on the other hand, is more focused on providing secure secret management and encryption capabilities. While it can handle a large number of secrets, its scalability is primarily related to the number of secrets and encryption/decryption operations.

3. Architecture: Rancher follows a microservices architecture, where various components are distributed across different machines or containers. It uses Kubernetes as its underlying infrastructure for container orchestration. Vault, on the other hand, is a standalone tool that can be deployed as a single binary or as a highly available cluster. It does not rely on any specific container orchestration platform.

4. Access Control: Rancher provides access control mechanisms to manage user permissions and restrict access to various resources. It integrates with popular identity providers and allows fine-grained control over who can access and modify different aspects of the platform. Vault, on the other hand, focuses on access control for secrets. It provides detailed policy-based access control to enforce who can access specific secrets or perform operations like encryption or decryption.

5. Secret Management: While Rancher can store secrets like API keys and passwords, it is not primarily designed for secure secret storage and distribution. Vault, on the other hand, places a strong emphasis on secret management. It provides a secure storage engine for secrets and allows dynamic secret generation and revocation. Vault also supports integrations with external secret backends like AWS Secrets Manager or Azure Key Vault.

6. Audit and Logging: Rancher provides comprehensive logging and audit capabilities to track user activities and system events. It captures and stores logs for monitoring and troubleshooting purposes. Vault also offers extensive audit logging features, capturing details of every request and response. Vault allows storing logs to multiple backends, making it easier to integrate with existing centralized logging systems.

In summary, Rancher is a container management platform aimed at simplifying the deployment and management of container clusters, while Vault is a tool focused on secure secret management and distribution. Rancher provides scalability, access control, and logging features, while Vault excels in secret management, access control for secrets, and audit logging capabilities.