I like to think of kubernetes as a way to programatically or declartively create your own data center on to which we can deploy our applications.
What is eksctl
eksctl
is a tool to create your kuberentes cluster on AWS's EKS.
I think of Rancher as an alterantive to EKS. It allows for management of K8s clusters regarless of provider and related orchestration tasks.
What is kind
Kind is a tool for managing your dev k8s cluster. Its super easy to get up and running with a local k8s cluster using kind.
Istio is a service mesh for addressing