Rancher 2.0 to Work with Amazon EKS

Today, Amazon announced a managed Kubernetes service called Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS). This means that all three major cloud providers—AWS, Azure, and GCP—now offer managed Kubernetes services. This is great news for Kubernetes users. Even though users always have the option to stand up their own Kubernetes clusters, and new tools like Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) make that process even easier, cloud-managed Kubernetes installations should be the best choice for the majority of Kubernetes users. At Rancher, we have been working towards a future where Kubernetes becomes the standard infrastructure available from all providers. With EKS, this vision is now a reality. We are excited about the prospect of Rancher 2.0 managing Kubernetes clusters of any kind, from any cloud provider. Rancher 2.0, currently under development and in technical preview, consists of the following three major components:

1. RKE. Rancher’s own lightweight Kubernetes installer and distro installs Kubernetes on vSphere and bare-metal servers as well as on clouds that do not yet offer a managed Kubernetes service.
2. Kubernetes cluster management. With Rancher 2.0, users can now provision Kubernetes clusters created by RKE, EKS, Google Container Engine (GKE), Azure Container Service (AKS), or any other Kubernetes cluster. IT administrators can set up centralized user authentication integrated with their AD/LDAP. Rancher additionally provides centralized role-based access control (RBAC), cluster capacity management, and cost management.
3. Application management. Rancher offers an easy-to-use user interface on top of Kubernetes, and integrates cloud-native ecosystem technologies such as CI/CD, centralized monitoring, and logging.

All these capabilities are available in the Rancher 2.0 tech preview 1.0 and RKE. Please join our online meetup tomorrow to learn more about the latest Rancher 2.0 enhancements, including RKE and our support for EKS. You can register for the meetup here.