I wish Rancher didn't adopt Kubernetes. Their Cattle was perfect for running distributed services on bare metal. It was simple and just worked. After the move to k8s I couldn't get anything to work and it was flaky. I am still running some projects on Cattle and they have few years uptime.
We liked 1.x/cattle as much as the next person but it was clear 4 years ago that k8s was going to win the mind-share & market.
Competing with that was a slow and painful path to irrelevance. Which was the path Mesos chose, along with Docker/Swarm to a large degree.
(Please stop running 1.x, especially if exposed to the internet; it hasn't been updated in ~3 years now and everything up and down the entire stack it supports are going to be full of CVEs.)
