Three Independent EKS Clusters Unified Under One Rancher Control Plane, MTTR Cut 35%
A global eCommerce retailer running three independently managed EKS clusters across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific had no unified health view, no cross-region cost visibility, and 20-minute incident triage windows during peak sales. During Black Friday, engineers scrambled across AWS console tabs, three Grafana instances, and region-specific Slack channels just to locate a checkout slowdown. Applying its AI-First approach, Ksolves brought all three clusters under one Rancher control plane, unified observability, RBAC, and GitOps-based deployments from a single command centre.
Key Challenges
01
No Unified Cluster Health Visibility: Each regional team ran its own Grafana and Prometheus. The central SRE team had to check four separate dashboards across three time zones to answer Is the platform healthy?02
Inconsistent RBAC Across Regions: IAM roles and Kubernetes RBAC were configured independently per cluster - security gaps, impossible audits, and 2 to 3 day engineer onboarding across three clusters.03
Slow Incident Response at Peak Traffic: Engineers spent 15 to 20 minutes triaging across disconnected monitoring silos before pinpointing the root cause - every minute of delay costing revenue at peak volumes.04
No Centralised Cost Visibility: No per-cluster or per-namespace cost attribution existed. The finance team could not identify idle resources or compare regional efficiency.05
Fragmented Deployment Pipelines: Each region used its own Helm values and CI/CD tooling. Rolling out a single patch required three separate manual processes with no drift detection.06
Alert Fatigue From Disconnected Monitoring: AlertManager rules differed per region, with no deduplication, and hundreds of overlapping alerts flooded on-call engineers during every incident.Our Solution
Ksolves consolidated three independent EKS regions into one Rancher control plane. The governing principle was augment, not replace - existing AWS IAM, CloudWatch, Prometheus, and Grafana investments woven into a cohesive operational layer, not discarded.
- 01 Rancher Multi-Cluster Manager: All three EKS clusters imported into a single Rancher server - one-click visibility into node health, workload status, and resource utilisation across every region simultaneously.
- 02 Centralised RBAC With AWS IAM: Rancher auth proxy federated with AWS IAM Identity Center, mapping organisational roles to Kubernetes ClusterRoles - per-cluster manual RBAC configuration eliminated.
- 03 Unified Observability Stack: Rancher Monitoring with Prometheus federation and Grafana aggregating metrics across all clusters into curated multi-region health, resource, and SLO dashboards.
- 04 Fleet GitOps for Multi-Cluster Deployments: Per-region Helm scripts replaced with Rancher Fleet - a single Git commit propagates a verified chart to all clusters with automatic drift detection and reconciliation.
- 05 CloudWatch Cost Dashboards: CloudWatch and Cost Explorer integrated into Grafana via data-source plugins - per-cluster and per-namespace spend trends surfaced for the finance team for the first time.
- 06 Centralised AlertManager With Deduplication: All AlertManager instances consolidated into one Rancher-managed config with cluster-scoped routing - overlapping alerts silenced before reaching on-call engineers.
Solution Architecture
Technology Stack
| Category | Technology |
|---|---|
| Platform | Amazon EKS |
| Infrastructure | Rancher (SUSE) |
| Infrastructure | Fleet + Helm |
| Monitoring | Prometheus + Grafana |
| Security | AWS IAM Identity Center |
| Monitoring | Amazon CloudWatch |
- MTTR Cut by 35%: Unified dashboards and centralised AlertManager reduced triage from 15 to 20 minutes to 10 to 13 minutes - revenue protected during Black Friday and seasonal peaks.
- Single Pane Replaced 4+ Dashboards: One Rancher dashboard shows cluster health, utilisation, and alerts across all three regions - three Grafana instances and multiple consoles replaced.
- Access Provisioning From Days to Under 10 Minutes: Rancher global permissions mapped to AWS IAM groups - 2 business days of manual RBAC work across three clusters replaced by self-service in under 10 minutes.
- Multi-Region Deployment Consistency: Single Fleet GitRepo commit deploys identical charts to all clusters with automatic drift detection - three independent manual Helm processes replaced by one.
- First-Ever Per-Cluster Cost Visibility: CloudWatch-integrated dashboards expose per-namespace spend - idle compute identified, and the finance team is given attribution that never previously existed.
Conclusion
A global eCommerce retailer with three siloed EKS clusters, no unified health view, and 20-minute incident triage windows was transformed into a single-pane operation through Ksolves DevOps consulting services. Rancher consolidated all three regions. MTTR dropped 35%. Access provisioning went from days to minutes. Fleet eliminated per-region deployments. CloudWatch delivered the first-ever cost attribution. A fourth region can now be onboarded in under a week.
