https://rancher.com/ logo
Title
a

agreeable-actor-89488

11/28/2022, 9:42 PM
Hello we are using Rancher to manage EKS clusters.. we are now looking into managing EKS-D. We have been reading a lot about RKE vs RKE2 (RKE2 seems to be ideal for managing EKS-D) .. We are trying to understand do we use the RKE2 install to create a cluster and Rancher still can manage it? Or do we need to run a whole new install for Rancher with RKE2 https://docs.rke2.io/install/quickstart#server-node-installation <-- this documentation seems to describe that RKE2 has its own separate server node therefore new rancher has to be installed? Documentation seems to not be complete or unclear Sources: https://docs.rke2.io/install/quickstart and https://docs.ranchermanager.rancher.io/pages-for-subheaders/installation-and-upgrade Any information would be helpful!
c

creamy-pencil-82913

11/28/2022, 11:19 PM
There was a proof of concept of this published a while back at https://www.suse.com/c/rancher_blog/deploying-amazon-eks-distro-with-rke2/
However, it is not really supported. RKE2 comes with its own images for the Kubernetes components, and while you CAN use those steps to use the eks-d binaries instead, it is not something we really recommend.
EKS-D was still in early access when that article was released, so the scripts probably don’t work with the current state of things and would need some tweaking.
a

agreeable-actor-89488

11/29/2022, 1:04 PM
Thank you for the response/background! Interesting.. so this documentation here : https://docs.ranchermanager.rancher.io/how-to-guides/new-user-guides/kubernetes-cluster-setup/rke2-for-rancher describes RKE2 being installed as a server so it appears that RKE2 is still being developed. And it needs to installed as a server where Rancher Management is installed as well as an agent for all clusters that Rancher needs to manage. Is that correct? Do you recommend RKE2 at all? Managing EKS-D would be a prototype to see how it works, from what we understand it appears we can only import the EKS-D cluster per Article below and that was from 2022. It seems like you can import EKS-D following documentation but it is unclear.. it sounds like SUSE rancher has not tested this management of EKS-D since 2020 then?
c

creamy-pencil-82913

11/29/2022, 6:44 PM
EKS-D is just a standard way for Amazon to publish the artifacts that they use internally for EKS clusters. You can take those artifacts and have RKE2 use them instead of the artifacts (binaries) that it would normally use.
👍 1
RKE2 is a Kubernetes distro that is still in active development, but has been stable for quite a while. We don’t actively support using EKS-D binaries though; that was just a proof of concept.
a

agreeable-actor-89488

11/29/2022, 7:17 PM
Got it. So not great for production use cases. Thank you so much for your clarification!