Fun experiment with Kubernetes: live migration of a cluster from a cloud provider to another

Hi all! How's everyone doing?

I wrote a post on a little experiment I did: the migration of a Rancher/RKE Kubernetes cluster from a cloud provider to another, "live" - that is, directly from one provider to the other one, not with backup followed by restore. It was fun... like moving a house from a location to another :D

Here's the post if interested: https://vitobotta.com/2020/10/25/kubernetes-live-migration/

In short, I set up the original cluster with Rancher in "custom nodes" mode, which means I use some existing nodes with just Docker as a requirement (Rancher uses RKE under the hood).

To allow migrating from a provider to another live, I couldn't use features like load balancers, block storage and private networks offered by the provider. For the load balancing there are various options, such as setting up a haproxy lb which is pretty easy, or use something like Cloudflare's load balancing service. For the storage instead I used Longhorn, since it makes moving volume replicas from a node to another incredibly easy. Moving the data to a totally different provider without disruption to the sample app was perhaps the coolest step of the test :D

I have been using Kubernetes for a year and a half and Rancher for a year or so. I love them both. They have changed the way I do things dramatically and I wouldn't go back to doing things "the old way".

Are you using Kubernetes? If yes, are using a managed service or self-managed with some distro, and which one? Also are you using Rancher to mange K8s?

Cheers