Chicken and the egg problem with HA Rancher cluster

Greetings!

Im very eager to start using Rancher in production, we have about 20 services running in Docker and for orchestration purposes using AWS ECS now. Im very appreciate the job you guys did and wonder how can i deploy Rancher Cluster with Rancher itself? In Docs i read that rancher depends on MySQL, Zookeper and Redis, so running these services outside rancher infrastructure and then starting rancher server is staight solution, but can i register them in rancher itself?
Maybe you suggest me to run ‘system rancher’ who control another rancher and it dependecies?)

+1?

I assume we would need multiple instances of MySQL, Zookeeper & Redis (all replicated) to keep things really ha?

EDIT: +1 or more LB instances to at least failover to the correct “rancher-server”?

I wonder if it would be possible to have a single service rancher-ha that runs on all hosts, for example? If its lightweight enough (as I imagine?) it shouldnt be a problem?

Or if not running in every host, at least in a certain percentage of the cluster?

Rancher on Rancher has been an idea kicking around internally for a while. We are going to be working towards an automated deployment of Rancher HA. Our first thought was you would have a single node installation to deploy the HA services on top of, and then attach nodes to HA services. We have evolved our thinking towards not needing the single node cluster and just doing some bootstrapping.

Currently, you would need multiple VM/Servers to deploy true HA. Zookeeper and Rancher are both Java apps that consume memory. So you would need decent sized instances to run on a single host. Also, when things get busy, Zookeeper should be kept on its own nodes. Redis and Zookeeper do not keep persistent state. So you do not need to ensure the data is stored/backed up. Redis is just for pubsub, and Zookeeper is used just for locks.

We will have a compose-template sometime in the near future that could be used to deploy an HA setup.

1 Like

Any update of this…would really be helpful

HA will be in 1.0.1 (any day now).