Is there consensus on the most mature way to deploy rancher managed clusters (not the rancher management cluster) using automation? Terraform, Ansible, CLI, etc? Definitely would want to deploy k3s and rke2 clusters.

We are running in AWS. When we started, 6 years ago, we used terraform. The last 3 clusters we created the vpc/subnets/sg using terraform, but the cluster itself was created using Raancher manager UI.

Thanks Ned! I am doing the same thing now, creating the VMs (in vmware) using Terraform. Just want to also be able to deploy the cluster as well. I can hand off to Ansible or even use Terraform to remote-exec or local-exec to get the cluster installed, just need to be able to do it in a repeatable way on a regular basis.

I’v been reading ‘Terraform In Action’ and the author suggest just that, use terraform for infrastructure and ansible for services/applications.

lol, right on. I mean Terraform is definitely not my favorite tool in the tool chest. Been Automating Kubernetes cluster deployment before kubeadm was even finished, but I used Cisco CloudCenter (I worked at Cisco on the CloudCenter team and did it for a PoC basically). Of course Cloud Center is EOL and not really a ton of OpenSource options out there in that space.

We’ve made the decision to move to AWS EKS. I have not figured out how Rancher fits in. I know I can import EKS clusters. We’ll be migrating our clusters to EKS over the next few months. Well actually we don’t make production changes during november/december so the migration will start in January. I’m doing a dev cluster now.

Well, we are a service provider in the blockchain space and will be doing our own offering but with Rancher clusters basically. EKS is alright, but I am just not the biggest fan of AWS. They are not cheap and getting support is like pulling teeth and super expensive. Just not worth it to me personally, but I know it is a popular choice for sure. The load balancer situation is definitely very nice to be fair.