I've been a big fan of Rancher for over 10 years. It's perfect for managing our roughly 20 EKS clusters, especially with its central UI for user access linked to our GitHub organization. I love how it integrates Prometheus for metrics and helps us manage workloads. However, since Rancher's acquisition by SuSE, their pricing has skyrocketed, which is a real bummer. I'm on the lookout for alternative tools that can provide similar features: a unified UI for all clusters, GitHub integration for authentication and user management, and handy widgets for metrics and monitoring. Any suggestions?
5 Answers
We considered Rancher briefly, but found K9s a great alternative for our dev team. ArgoCD is fantastic for GitOps style deployments, and using Kube-Prometheus-stack for monitoring keeps everything running smoothly. It might take some adjustment, but I think you’d find it worthwhile!
One cool thing is that Rancher’s shell pods include K9s, making it easier to manage.
I lean towards using the community version of Rancher, as it covers most needs without the high costs after the acquisition. You might want to consider that option to cut down on enterprise licensing.
We faced a similar issue and decided to stick with Rancher without paid support. The downside is that LTS versions aren't publicly released, but we manage by building our own from the source.
Yeah, we’re doing the same now, and honestly, it’s a solid approach for cutting costs.
If you're already on AWS, consider if Rancher is really necessary, as it adds redundancy. AWS IAM works great with GitHub for authorization. You might also check out Headlamp as a lighter UI alternative to Rancher, which offers similar functionality.
FYI, Rancher does have official support for AWS, so if you're on a managed service, you might find lighter support packages worth looking into.
True, but what are you using for SSO? The native EKS options are solid without needing Rancher for project management.
What features do you absolutely need? Gardener is another option that’s free and open-source, plus it supports multi-cloud setups.
Rancher’s features like the central UI, GitHub integration, embedded Prometheus, and easy tool complements like Splunk and Datadog are crucial for us.
Just a heads up, K9s is great for operations but might not be user-friendly enough for developers who need a more simplified interface.