Setup Rancher with HA & running Kubernetes on top of it.

In this blog, we are setting up a highly available Rancher cluster in AWS and running Kubernetes on top of it

Why Rancher?

Rancher is a complete, open source platform for deploying and managing containers in production. It includes commercially-supported distributions of Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm, making it easy to run containerized applications on any infrastructure.

Follow the below steps:

FYI, from the below images, you may notice the ELB’s & ip’s, don’t worry 🙄🙄 it’s a temporary cluster created for testing 😛😜
Here I will be creating the AWS setup as below:

Rancher setup in AWS

Create 3 instance for Rancher Server using the Community AMI

Rancher Server in AWS

Create 3 instance for Rancher Host using the Community AMI

Rancher Host in AWS

Create ELB for Rancher Server

ELB for Rancher Server in AWS

Put ELB Listeners as below:

ELB Listeners for Rancher Server

Put ELB Healthcheck as below:

ELB Healthcheck for Rancher Server

Created 4 security groups: You can view more details from here

Security for Rancher Server

Once you setup the ELB, you need to enable the proxy protocol mode

$ aws elb create-load-balancer-policy \
     --load-balancer-name rancher-elb \  
     --policy-name rancher-elb-policy \
     --policy-type-name ProxyProtocolPolicyType \
     --policy-attributes AttributeName=ProxyProtocol,AttributeValue=true \
     --region eu-west-1


$ aws elb set-load-balancer-policies-for-backend-server \
      --load-balancer-name rancher-elb \
      --instance-port 80 \
      --policy-names rancher-elb-policy  \
      --region eu-west-1


$ aws elb set-load-balancer-policies-for-backend-server \
      --load-balancer-name rancher-elb \
      --instance-port 8080 \
      --policy-names rancher-elb-policy \
      --region eu-west-1

Create a MySql RDS instance

Mysql RDS instance

Once the Rancher Server is UP, Login to those servers and run the below command:


docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped -p 8080:8080 -p 9345:9345 \
       rancher/server:latest \
       --db-host <your rds endpoint> \
       --db-port 3306 --db-user <your db user> \
       --db-pass <your db password> --db-name <your db name> \
       --advertise-address <put your rancher private server ip>

Once the cluster is UP, you can authorize it with Github

Rancher access

Rancher github

Once you authorized, you can add host like below:

Rancher custom host

You can also add host by running the command on each host nodes like below:

sudo docker run -e CATTLE_AGENT_IP="172.31.42.207"  \
    -d --privileged \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v /var/lib/rancher:/var/lib/rancher \
    rancher/agent:v1.2.1 http://rancher-elb-1978581874.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com/v1/scripts/79081F08916A15D4F9F8:1483142400000:k2tRsgImqrdonHsdFYEtpI2ss