Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Management with Fleet and Rancher

I’ve been running Kubernetes in production for years now, and there’s a specific kind of pain that only hits you once you cross the threshold from “a couple of clusters” to “wait, how many do we have again?” That threshold, for me, was eight clusters. Eight clusters across three cloud providers and two on-prem data centers. And every single one of them had drifted into its own little snowflake. This isn’t a theoretical post. I’m going to walk through how I used Fleet and Rancher to wrangle that mess back into something manageable, and why I think GitOps-driven multi-cluster management is the only sane approach once you’re past three or four clusters.