Pilot your Kubernetes with precision using Managed Rancher Service

Multi-cluster management involves managing multiple Kubernetes clusters in diverse environments—on-prem datacentres, public cloud, or hybrid setups. Rather than managing clusters separately, a multi-cluster management solution gives you a platform to centrally monitor and automate all your cluster tasks. The benefits of this approach include improved efficiency, streamlined processes, and consistent governance and security policies applied across the board. It helps teams better manage their infrastructure and applications, no matter where your clusters are deployed.

Using multiple clusters helps you allocate resources more efficiently, optimise security, and boost overall performance. You can configure different clusters for different purposes—like keeping development, staging, and production environments separate to avoid interference or downtime. This makes your setup more reliable as workloads are distributed across clusters, so if one fails, the others can still handle your workloads. Plus, multiple clusters are necessary for better security and compliance because they keep sensitive workloads separate. They offer more scalability for teams to handle large-scale operations, and flexibly adapt to different workloads, locations, or cloud providers.

Juggling multiple clusters is tough. First, keeping security policies consistent across the board can be difficult, especially when clusters are deployed across several environments or cloud providers. Without centralised control, ensuring uniform role-based access control (RBAC) and managing permissions can become overwhelming. Also, it’s hard to keep track of the health, performance, and workloads of each cluster without the right tools. Careful orchestration is needed to evenly distribute workloads and avoid cluster performance issues. Lastly, to avoid downtime and maintain business continuity, it’s crucial to coordinate carefully when scaling infrastructure and handling updates or patches across multiple clusters.

The Managed Rancher Service makes it easy to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters, including those created with the Managed Kubernetes Service.
The Managed Kubernetes Service simplifies managing containerised applications within the same Kubernetes cluster.
The two services are complementary, but one doesn’t necessarily require the use of the other.

You can manually manage your Kubernetes clusters created with Managed Kubernetes without using Managed Rancher.

Alternatively, you can use the Managed Rancher Service to manage Kubernetes clusters other than those created with the Managed Kubernetes Service, such as Kubernetes clusters on OVHcloud Bare Metal servers, or with other cloud providers (on premises or not).

The Managed Rancher Service includes all of the solutions available in SUSE Rancher. You focus on your downstream clusters (clusters that host your business applications), while OVHcloud takes care of Rancher’s deployment, operational maintenance, and security updates. We have signed a support agreement with SUSE, making us your single point of contact for support on the Rancher platform.

Managed Rancher Service comes in two plans: ‘OVHcloud Edition’ and ‘Standard’, both available on a pay-as-you-go basis. Billing is calculated based on the overall vCPUs used in your downstream clusters.

• OVHCloud Edition plan: £0.0061 ex. VAT/hour/vCPU*
• Standard plan: £0.0153 ex. VAT/hour/vCPU*

      *With a minimum of 20 vCPUs

Yes. You can manage any Kubernetes cluster (from OVHcloud, other cloud providers, or on-premises) via the Managed Rancher Service.