Elasticsearch & Kibana on K8s w/ Rancher Desktop & Rancher Cluster Manager 2.6

Rancher Desktop makes it so easy!

ONLY PREREQUISITE: Install Rancher Desktop from https://rancherdesktop.io/

It’s that easy: double click and get a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster! I’ve been searching for something this easy for a while and am so grateful for the great folks at SUSE/Rancher Labs!

THIS POST IS AN UPDATE TO: Rancher 2.4 & Kubernetes on your Windows 10 laptop with multipass & k3s — then deploy ES+Kibana

Once Rancher Desktop is installed, you’ll have a K8s cluster all the tools you need including kubectl, nerdctl, and helm! Note that all of these tools will be conveniently configured to work with your local cluster 😃

K8s tools automagically installed!

1/6 Deploy Rancher Cluster Manager prerequisite cert-manager 1.5.1

Rancher Cluster Manager provides a wonderful GUI for observing and editing K8s resources at all levels from clusters to users. You don’t need to have this to run K8s, but it makes tasks a lot simpler and more observable.

To deploy Rancher via helm, you’ll need to deploy the cert-manager app first. We’ll follow the instructions from the Rancher docs: https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.5/en/installation/install-rancher-on-k8s/#4-install-cert-manager

The standard way to deploy a workload via helm is to:
1. Create a namespace for the deployment
2. Add the helm repo and update
3. Install app via helm install

For cert-manager, there are two extra steps to take, and you will have to install the CustomResourceDefinition resources and label the cert-manager namespace to disable resource validation. Luckily, cert-manager provides these as args in its install command 😃

# Add the Jetstack Helm repository
helm repo add jetstack https://charts.jetstack.io

# Update your local Helm chart repository…