RANCHER - A cluster management platform

Rancher is 100% free and open source software platform that enables enterprise to run containers in production. It is a complete software stack for teams adopting containers. It has the capability that it can import your k8s-cluster no matter from where it comes from. It is a single cluster-multi tenancy tool. It addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple k8s-clusters across any infrastructure, while providing DevOps teams with integrated tools for running containerized workloads.

Resources like Istio, pipeline, prometheus, grafana are integrated with Rancher.

getting start with rancher via Docker

$ docker pull rancher/rancher
$ docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped -p 61090:80 -p 61091:443 -v /software/bea/rancher:/var/lib/rancher --privileged rancher/rancher:latest

access the Rancher console by hitting - https:localhost:61091/
follow the welcome instructions on the screen and it will land up to your Global screen of clusters.
once your setup is complete, start adding any of your k8s-cluster.

in this example I am going to add my vanilla k8s-cluster which is running on-prem.

navigate to Add-cluster > other cluster > give a name to your cluster 

rancher will generate commands for you to import your cluster, which you need to run in your cluster CLI as below

$ kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding --clusterrole cluster-admin --user [USER_ACCOUNT]

$ kubectl apply -f https://10.50.137.168:61091/v3/import/s8dkk7demo6fp2f6qffhmlkr.yaml

if you get a certificate related error try running on insecure channel

$ curl --insecure -sfL https://10.50.137.168:61091/v3/import/s8dkk7demo6fp2f6qffhmlkr.yaml | kubectl apply -f 

this will deploy required resources

you will be able to see your cluster added into rancher now

keep reading.. lot more to come...

k/r
P