Cloud Provider: Difference between Amazon and external

When you deploy a EC2 Kubernetes cluster using Rancher, there is an option to select “cloud provider” with 3 choices, none, amazon, and external. What is the difference between using amazon or external? Does external also allow you to use load balancers and ebs volumes integrated with your cluster ?

Not using any of those options, but I would recommend EKS instead. EKS + Rancher is a great combination, as AWS manages the etcd/controlplane, and you just define how many workers, etc. Works very well with Terraform + rancher2 provider. If there is a problem with the worker, you terminate it and a new one will be created in its place and automatically added to the cluster. With EC2, I’d always be worried about the etcd database and having to manage the cluster.