Adopting a GKE Cluster with Rancher 2.0


Rancher 2.0 is out and odds are, you’re wondering what’s so shiny and new about it. Well, here’s a huge selling point for the next big Rancher release; Kubernetes cluster adoption! That’s right, we here at Rancher wanted more kids, so we decided it was time to adopt. In all seriousness though, this feature helps make Rancher more relevant to developers who already have Kubernetes clusters deployed and are looking for a new way to manage them. One of the most powerful aspects of this feature is that it allows you to build a cluster from multiple cloud container engines, including GKE, and keep them all under one management roof. In order to adopt a GKE cluster into Rancher 2.0, you’ll first need an instance of Rancher 2.0 running. To bootstrap a 2.0 server, check out this guide here. Stop before selecting to Add Hosts and pop right back here when you’re done.

Acquiring your Kubectl Command

Now that you have a Rancher 2.0 server up and running, you’ll be presented with a page like the one below:

Rancher 2.0 Home Page Rancher 2.0 Home Page

Of course, we want to select Use Existing Kubernetes as we’re trying to adopt an existing GKE cluster. On the next page, we’re presented with a Host Registration URL menu, where we want to provide the publicly accessible hostname and port for our Rancher server. As I set up my host using a domain name in the form rancher.<domain>.<tld>, Rancher has already found the address for the site and defaults to the proper hostname. If you’re using a different network setup, just know that this hostname has to be accessible by all the machines in the Kubernetes cluster we are adopting. Click Save when you’re finished making your choice.

Host Registration URL Host Registration URL

Now we are presented with a kubectl command which can be copied to your clipboard by clicking the little clipboard icon to the right of the command. Copy the command and save it in a notepad to use later.

Kubectl Apply Kubectl Apply

Important note: if you already have a cluster in GKE, you can skip the following section and go straight to Adopting a GKE Cluster

Creating a GKE Cluster

Next, hop on over to your GKE control panel and, if you don’t yet have a GKE cluster up and running, click the Create Cluster button.

Create Cluster Create Cluster

The cluster settings can be configured however you wish. I’ll be using the name eric-rancher-demo, the us-central1-a zone, version 1.7.5-gke.1 (default) and 1vCPU, 2GB RAM machines. Leave the OS as the Container-Optimized OS(cos) and all other settings at the default. My finished settings looks like this:

Container Cluster Settings []

You might want to grab some coffee after clicking Create, as GKE takes a while (5-10 minutes) to stand up your Kubernetes cluster.

Adopting a GKE Cluster

Now that we have both a Rancher 2.0 server stood up and a GKE cluster running and ready, we want to configure gcloud utils and kubectl to connect to our GKE cluster. In order to install gcloud utils on Debian and Ubuntu based machines, follow the steps outlined here on Google’s website. For all other distros, find your guide here. Once we get the message gcloud has now been configured!, we can move onto the next step. To install kubectl all we need to do is type gcloud components install kubectl. Now that we have kubectl installed, in order to connect to our cluster, we want to click on the Connect to the cluster link at the top of the page in GKE.

Connect to the cluster Connect to the cluster

A window will pop up providing instructions to Configure kubectl command line access by running the following command.

Copy that command and paste it into your terminal window. In this case:

$ gcloud container clusters get-credentials eric-rancher-demo --zone us-central1-a --project rancher-dev
> Fetching cluster endpoint and auth data.
> kubeconfig entry generated for eric-rancher-demo.

Our kubectl is now hooked up to the cluster. We should be able to simply paste the command from the Rancher 2.0 setup we did earlier, and Rancher will adopt the cluster.

$ kubectl apply -f http://rancher.<domain>.<tld>/v3/scripts/2CFC9454A034E7C3E367:1483142400000:feQRTz4WmIemlAUSy4O37vuF0.yaml
> namespace "cattle-system" created
> serviceaccount "rancher" created
> clusterrolebinding "rancher" created
> secret "rancher-credentials-39124a03" created
> pod "cluster-register-39124a03" created
> daemonset "rancher-agent" created

Note: You cannot adopt a Kubernetes cluster if it has been previously adopted by a Rancher 2.0 server unless you delete the namespace cattle-system from the Kubernetes installation. You can do this by typing kubectl delete --namespace cattle-system and waiting 5 minutes for the namespace to clear out.

Checking our Results

That’s all we need to do to adopt the GKE cluster. If we head back on over to the Rancher server, we should see a Hosts page with our new Kubernetes hosts up and running and ready for action. If you’d like to launch a test container onto the hosts, you can follow the remaining steps in my Bootstrapping Rancher 2.0 tutorial here. Stay tuned to see some more demonstrations of Rancher 2.0 and feel free to give us feedback on our user Slack in the channel #2-0-tech-preview, or on our forums. Student at the University of Chicago

Eric Volpert is a student at the University of Chicago and works as an evangelist, growth hacker, and writer for our Rancher Labs. He enjoys any engineering challenge. He’s spent the last three summers as an internal tools engineer at Bloomberg and a year building DNS services for the Secure Domain Foundation with CrowdStrike. Eric enjoys many forms of music ranging from EDM to High Baroque, playing MOBAs and other action-packed games on his PC, and late-night hacking sessions, duct taping APIs together so he can make coffee with a voice command.

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