⚓️ Anchoring a Fleet of Kubernetes Clusters: Our Journey to Centralized Control

As our company's services grow, we need to run applications on an increasing number of Kubernetes clusters - across dev, test, production environments and multiple regions. This leads to a complex, decentralized cluster infrastructure that is difficult to manage efficiently.

Managing a fleet of disparate clusters creates issues like:

• No centralized visibility or control into cluster health and resources

• Config drift across clusters as they are changed independently

• Lack of consistency in how apps are deployed and networking is set up

• Scaling cluster capacity up and down manually cluster by cluster

• Hard to reason about costs across many clusters

To solve these challenges, we need a fleet management layer that provides:

• Unified visibility - centralized monitoring and logging across all clusters no matter the infrastructure

• Consistency - enforce standard configurations, resource limits, security policies across fleets

• Automation - tools to automate cluster deployment, upgrading, autoscaling, etc

• Efficiency - right size clusters, balance load, reduce costs across environments

Example tools and solutions:

• Rancher - open source Kubernetes fleet management, integrates with cloud providers

# Create new EKS cluster in Rancher GUI 
rancher cluster create 

# Apply fleet-wide pod security policy
rancher policy create psp

• Cluster API - Kubernetes sub-project for managing infrastructure life cycle

• Terraform - automate infrastructure provisioning across providers

With robust fleet management, we gain centralized control, consistency, automated operations, and optimized usage across a distributed Kubernetes infrastructure - enabling easier scaling.