Rancher AWS Quick Start Guide

The following steps will quickly deploy a Rancher server on AWS in a single-node K3s Kubernetes cluster, with a single-node downstream Kubernetes cluster attached.

caution

The intent of these guides is to quickly launch a sandbox that you can use to evaluate Rancher. These guides are not intended for production environments. For comprehensive setup instructions, see Installation.

Prerequisites

caution

Deploying to Amazon AWS will incur charges.

• Amazon AWS Account: An Amazon AWS Account is required to create resources for deploying Rancher and Kubernetes.
• Amazon AWS Access Key: Use this link to follow a tutorial to create an Amazon AWS Access Key if you don’t have one yet.
• IAM Policy created: Defines the permissions an account attached with this policy has.
• Install Terraform: Used to provision the server and cluster in Amazon AWS.

Example IAM Policy

The AWS module just creates an EC2 KeyPair, an EC2 SecurityGroup and an EC2 instance. A simple policy would be:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "ec2:*",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Getting Started

1. Clone Rancher Quickstart to a folder using git clone https://github.com/rancher/quickstart.

2. Go into the AWS folder containing the Terraform files by executing cd quickstart/rancher/aws.

3. Rename the terraform.tfvars.example file to terraform.tfvars.

4. Edit terraform.tfvars and customize the following variables:

   • aws_access_key - Amazon AWS Access Key
   • aws_secret_key - Amazon AWS Secret Key
   • rancher_server_admin_password - Admin password for created Rancher server (minimum 12 characters)

5. Optional: Modify optional variables within terraform.tfvars. See the Quickstart Readme and the AWS Quickstart Readme for more information. Suggestions include:

   • aws_region - Amazon AWS region, choose the closest instead of the default (us-east-1)
   • prefix - Prefix for all created resources
   • instance_type - EC2 instance size used, minimum is t3a.medium but t3a.large or t3a.xlarge could be used if within budget
   • add_windows_node - If true, an additional Windows worker node is added to the workload cluster

6. Run terraform init.

7. To initiate the creation of the environment, run terraform apply --auto-approve. Then wait for output similar to the following:

   Apply complete! Resources: 16 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.
   Outputs:
   rancher_node_ip = xx.xx.xx.xx
   rancher_server_url = https://rancher.xx.xx.xx.xx.sslip.io
   workload_node_ip = yy.yy.yy.yy

8. Paste the rancher_server_url from the output above into the browser. Log in when prompted (default username is admin, use the password set in rancher_server_admin_password).

9. ssh to the Rancher Server using the id_rsa key generated in quickstart/rancher/aws.

Result

Two Kubernetes clusters are deployed into your AWS account, one running Rancher Server and the other ready for experimentation deployments. Please note that while this setup is a great way to explore Rancher functionality, a production setup should follow our high availability setup guidelines. SSH keys for the VMs are auto-generated and stored in the module directory.

What’s Next?

Use Rancher to create a deployment. For more information, see Creating Deployments.

Destroying the Environment

1. From the quickstart/rancher/aws folder, execute terraform destroy --auto-approve.

2. Wait for confirmation that all resources have been destroyed.