Installing Rancher on Amazon EKS

This page covers installing Rancher on an Amazon EKS cluster. You can also install Rancher through the AWS Marketplace.

If you already have an EKS Kubernetes cluster, skip to the step about installing an ingress. Then install the Rancher Helm chart following the instructions on this page.

Creating an EKS Cluster for the Rancher Server

In this section, you'll install an EKS cluster with an ingress by using command line tools. This guide may be useful if you want to use fewer resources while trying out Rancher on EKS.

Prerequisites:

• You should already have an AWS account.
• It is recommended to use an IAM user instead of the root AWS account. You will need the IAM user's access key and secret key to configure the AWS command line interface.
• The IAM user needs the minimum IAM policies described in the official eksctl documentation.

1. Prepare your Workstation

Install the following command line tools on your workstation:

• The AWS CLI v2: For help, refer to these installation steps.
• eksctl: For help, refer to these installation steps.
• kubectl: For help, refer to these installation steps.
• helm: For help, refer to these installation steps.

2. Configure the AWS CLI

To configure the AWS CLI, run the following command:

aws configure

Then enter the following values:

Value	Description
AWS Access Key ID	The access key credential for the IAM user with EKS permissions.
AWS Secret Access Key	The secret key credential for the IAM user with EKS permissions.
Default region name	An AWS region where the cluster nodes will be located.
Default output format	Enter json.

3. Create the EKS Cluster

To create an EKS cluster, run the following command. Use the AWS region that applies to your use case. When choosing a Kubernetes version, be sure to first consult the support matrix to find the highest version of Kubernetes that has been validated for your Rancher version.

Note: If you're updating from an older version of Kubernetes, to Kubernetes v1.22 or above, you also need to update ingress-nginx.

eksctl create cluster \
  --name rancher-server \
  --version <VERSION> \
  --region us-west-2 \
  --nodegroup-name ranchernodes \
  --nodes 3 \
  --nodes-min 1 \
  --nodes-max 4 \
  --managed

The cluster will take some time to be deployed with CloudFormation.

4. Test the Cluster

To test the cluster, run:

eksctl get cluster

The result should look like the following:

eksctl get cluster
2021-03-18 15:09:35 [ℹ]  eksctl version 0.40.0
2021-03-18 15:09:35 [ℹ]  using region us-west-2
NAME        REGION      EKSCTL CREATED
rancher-server-cluster      us-west-2   True

5. Install an Ingress

The cluster needs an Ingress so that Rancher can be accessed from outside the cluster.

To make sure that you choose the correct Ingress-NGINX Helm chart, first find an Ingress-NGINX version that's compatible with your Kubernetes version in the Kubernetes/ingress-nginx support table.

Then, list the Helm charts available to you by running the following command:

helm repo add ingress-nginx https://kubernetes.github.io/ingress-nginx
helm repo update
helm search repo ingress-nginx -l

The helm search command's output contains an APP VERSION column. The versions under this column are equivalent to the Ingress-NGINX version you chose earlier. Using the app version, select a chart version that bundles an app compatible with your Kubernetes install. For example, if you have Kubernetes v1.23, you can select the v4.6.0 Helm chart, since Ingress-NGINX v1.7.0 comes bundled with that chart, and v1.7.0 is compatible with Kubernetes v1.23. When in doubt, select the most recent compatible version.

Now that you know which Helm chart version you need, run the following command. It installs an nginx-ingress-controller with a Kubernetes load balancer service:

helm upgrade --install \
  ingress-nginx ingress-nginx/ingress-nginx \
  --namespace ingress-nginx \
  --set controller.service.type=LoadBalancer \
  --version 4.6.0 \
  --create-namespace

6. Get Load Balancer IP

To get the address of the load balancer, run:

kubectl get service ingress-nginx-controller --namespace=ingress-nginx

The result should look similar to the following:

NAME                       TYPE           CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP                                                              PORT(S)
 AGE
ingress-nginx-controller   LoadBalancer   10.100.90.18   a904a952c73bf4f668a17c46ac7c56ab-962521486.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com   80:31229/TCP,443:31050/TCP
 27m

Save the EXTERNAL-IP.

7. Set up DNS

External traffic to the Rancher server will need to be directed at the load balancer you created.

Set up a DNS to point at the external IP that you saved. This DNS will be used as the Rancher server URL.

There are many valid ways to set up the DNS. For help, refer to the AWS documentation on routing traffic to an ELB load balancer.

8. Install the Rancher Helm Chart

Next, install the Rancher Helm chart by following the instructions on this page. The Helm instructions are the same for installing Rancher on any Kubernetes distribution.

Use that DNS name from the previous step as the Rancher server URL when you install Rancher. It can be passed in as a Helm option. For example, if the DNS name is rancher.my.org, you could run the Helm installation command with the option --set hostname=rancher.my.org.

When installing Rancher on top of this setup, you will also need to pass the value below into the Rancher Helm install command in order to set the name of the ingress controller to be used with Rancher's ingress resource:

--set ingress.ingressClassName=nginx

Refer here for the Helm install command for your chosen certificate option.