Creating an Aliyun ACK Cluster

You can use Rancher to create a cluster hosted in Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes (ACK). Rancher has already implemented and packaged the cluster driver for ACK, but by default, this cluster driver is inactive. In order to launch ACK clusters, you will need to enable the ACK cluster driver. After enabling the cluster driver, you can start provisioning ACK clusters.

Prerequisites Outside of Rancher

Note Deploying to ACK will incur charges.

  1. In Aliyun, activate the following services in their respective consoles.

  2. Make sure that the account you will be using to create the ACK cluster has the appropriate permissions. Referring to the official Alibaba Cloud documentation about Role authorization and Use the Container Service console as a RAM user for details.

  3. In Alibaba Cloud, create an access key.

  4. In Alibaba Cloud, create an SSH key pair. This key is used to access nodes in the Kubernetes cluster.

Prerequisite in Rancher

You will need to enable the Alibaba ACK cluster driver:

  1. Click ☰ > Cluster Management.
  2. Click Drivers.
  3. In the Cluster Drivers tab, go to the Alibaba ACK cluster driver and click ⋮ > Activate.

When the cluster driver is finished downloading, you will be able to create Alibaba ACK clusters in Rancher.

Create an ACK Cluster

  1. Click ☰ > Cluster Management.
  2. From the Clusters page, click Create.
  3. Choose Alibaba ACK.
  4. Enter a Cluster Name.
  5. Use Member Roles to configure user authorization for the cluster. Click Add Member to add users that can access the cluster. Use the Role drop-down to set permissions for each user.
  6. Configure Account Access for the ACK cluster. Choose the geographical region in which to build your cluster, and input the access key that was created as part of the prerequisite steps.
  7. Click Next: Configure Cluster, then choose cluster type, the version of Kubernetes and the availability zone.
  8. If you choose Kubernetes as the cluster type, Click Next: Configure Master Nodes, then complete the Master Nodes form.
  9. Click Next: Configure Worker Nodes, then complete the Worker Nodes form.
  10. Review your options to confirm they’re correct. Then click Create.

Result:

Your cluster is created and assigned a state of Provisioning. Rancher is standing up your cluster.

You can access your cluster after its state is updated to Active.

Active clusters are assigned two Projects:

  • Default, containing the default namespace
  • System, containing the cattle-system, ingress-nginx, kube-public, and kube-system namespaces