The first is a guide for deploying the Rancher server on an EKS cluster using CloudFormation. This guide was created in collaboration with Amazon Web Services to show how to deploy Rancher following best practices.

The second is a guide for installing an EKS cluster with an ingress by using command line tools. This guide may be useful if you want to use fewer resources while trying out Rancher on EKS.

If you already have an EKS Kubernetes cluster, skip to the step about installing an ingress. Then install the Rancher Helm chart following the instructions on

Automated Quickstart using AWS Best Practices

Rancher and Amazon Web Services collaborated on a quick start guide for deploying Rancher on an EKS cluster following AWS best practices. The deployment guide is

The quick start guide provides three options for deploying Rancher on EKS:

  • Deploy Rancher into a new VPC and new Amazon EKS cluster. This option builds a new AWS environment consisting of the VPC, subnets, NAT gateways, security groups, bastion hosts, Amazon EKS cluster, and other infrastructure components. It then deploys Rancher into this new EKS cluster.
  • Deploy Rancher into an existing VPC and a new Amazon EKS cluster. This option provisions Rancher in your existing AWS infrastructure.
  • Deploy Rancher into an existing VPC and existing Amazon EKS cluster. This option provisions Rancher in your existing AWS infrastructure.

Deploying this Quick Start for a new virtual private cloud (VPC) and new Amazon EKS cluster using default parameters builds the following Rancher environment in the AWS Cloud:

  • A highly available architecture that spans three Availability Zones.*
  • In the public subnets:
    • Managed network address translation (NAT) gateways to allow outbound internet access for resources.*
    • Linux bastion hosts in an Auto Scaling group to allow inbound Secure Shell (SSH) access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in public and private subnets.*
  • In the private subnets:
    • Kubernetes nodes in an Auto Scaling group.*
    • A Network Load Balancer (not shown) for accessing the Rancher console.
  • Rancher deployment using AWS Systems Manager automation.
  • Amazon EKS service for the EKS cluster, which provides the Kubernetes control plane.*
  • An Amazon Route 53 DNS record for accessing the Rancher deployment.

* The CloudFormation template that deploys the Quick Start into an existing Amazon EKS cluster skips the components marked by asterisks and prompts you for your existing VPC configuration.

Creating an EKS Cluster for the Rancher Server

In this section, you’ll install an EKS cluster with an ingress by using command line tools. This guide may be useful if you want to use fewer resources while trying out Rancher on EKS.

Install the following command line tools on your workstation:

  • The AWS CLI v2: For help, refer to these
  • eksctl: For help, refer to these installation steps.
  • kubectl: For help, refer to these

2. Configure the AWS CLI

To configure the AWS CLI, run the following command:

Then enter the following values:

To create an EKS cluster, run the following command. Use the AWS region that applies to your use case:

  1. eksctl create cluster \
  2.   --name rancher-server \
  3.   --version 1.18 \
  4.   --region us-west-2 \
  5.   --nodegroup-name ranchernodes \
  7.   --nodes-min 1 \
  8.   --nodes-max 4 \
  9.   --managed

The cluster will take some time to be deployed with CloudFormation.

4. Test the Cluster

To test the cluster, run:

The result should look like the following:

  1. eksctl get cluster
  2. 2021-03-18 15:09:35 [ℹ]  eksctl version 0.40.0
  4. NAME        REGION        EKSCTL CREATED
  5. rancher-server-cluster        us-west-2    True

The cluster needs an Ingress so that Rancher can be accessed from outside the cluster.

6. Get Load Balancer IP

To get the address of the load balancer, run:

  1. kubectl get service ingress-nginx-controller --namespace=ingress-nginx

The result should look similar to the following:

Save the EXTERNAL-IP.

External traffic to the Rancher server will need to be directed at the load balancer you created.

Set up a DNS to point at the external IP that you saved. This DNS will be used as the Rancher server URL.

There are many valid ways to set up the DNS. For help, refer to the AWS documentation on

8. Install the Rancher Helm Chart

Next, install the Rancher Helm chart by following the instructions on The Helm instructions are the same for installing Rancher on any Kubernetes distribution.

Use that DNS name from the previous step as the Rancher server URL when you install Rancher. It can be passed in as a Helm option. For example, if the DNS name is , you could run the Helm installation command with the option --set hostname=rancher.my.org.