Project Name

Three Independent EKS Clusters Unified Under One Rancher Control Plane, MTTR Cut 35%

Three Independent EKS Clusters Unified Under One Rancher Control Plane, MTTR Cut 35%
Industry
E-Commerce, Retail
Technology
Amazon EKS, Rancher (SUSE), Fleet, Helm, Prometheus, Grafana, AWS IAM Identity Center, Amazon CloudWatch

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Three Independent EKS Clusters Unified Under One Rancher Control Plane, MTTR Cut 35%
Client Overview

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
  • 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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Unified Observability Stack: Rancher Monitoring with Prometheus federation and Grafana aggregating metrics across all clusters into curated multi-region health, resource, and SLO dashboards.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Technology Stack

Category Technology
Platform Amazon EKS
Infrastructure Rancher (SUSE)
Infrastructure Fleet + Helm
Monitoring Prometheus + Grafana
Security AWS IAM Identity Center
Monitoring Amazon CloudWatch
Impact
  • 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.
Solution Architecture
stream-dfd
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.

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