Managing Kubernetes Clusters in a multi cloud environment

Nowadays production applications of the Database Applications and Reporting services section (IT-DB-DAR) are running in Kubernetes, taking advantage of the benefits of this technology. The portability of the new infrastructure allows running applications in a Hybrid Cloud environment for Disaster Recovery purposes, but also adds extra complexity to managing clusters in different cloud providers. To this aim, this project explored the use of Rancher to monitor the resource usage of Kubernetes clusters deployed on different clouds and also to provide read-only access to any user using them. The integration with CERN’s authentication service has been the main challenge of the project, having to extend Rancher functionality to be able to use it. Additionally, a basic access control schema using local users was developed using Helm charts. Further work is required in order to effectively implement the extended functionalities in the official Rancher version.