Rancher with K8S - How should we work?

Rancher 1.x
1

TL;DR:
Rancher used only to deploy clusters or also as orchestration mechanism which uses k8s at the backend? Rancher+K8S Worth anything if we work with Rancher API/UI?

Hey all.

My team and I are looking for a good containers orchestration solution and we are very interested in Rancher.

We set up a k8s cluster with rancher and we started to play.

After 2 months of playing with Rancher, yet we don’t know if the developers teams should work with rancher API or with K8S?

It looks like any job done with Rancher, doesnt really effect K8S. for example, if we create container with Rancher, kubectl commands show that k8s isn’t really familiar with these containers. stacks is 100% Rancher thing and K8S doesn’t understands stack.

My question is:
Why should i work with Rancher over K8S cluster through Rancher API/UI? Is that how I should work with K8S+Rancher? Or Rancher should be used only to Deploy&Update K8S clusters and all the Developers work should be only through K8S.
Because when we worked through Rancher API/UI, it felt like it aimed 100% for cattle and has a little touch wik K8S abilities.

Thank you all and sorry for digging, im really tired of trying to get the idea of it.

2

Use kubectl for day to day tasks like deploying, debugging, etc.

Rancher helps in the cluster admin tasks and it has an opinionated take on how to install and configure the cluster. But once it’s done, Kube’s normal toolset is the way to go.

1 Like
3

In my brief experience with Rancher and Kubernetes, what Rancher does is makes it very easy to deploy a Kubernetes cluster. I believe you are correct that once the cluster is deployed, any interaction with K8S should be done through the API or UI, which are accessible via the Rancher UI. I have deployed a test K8 cluster using Kubeadm, and with Rancher, and Rancher makes the deployment much simpler. I also think it makes accessing the UI/API easier since Rancher handles the proxying to the cluster, whereas you would have to manually proxy in a pure K8S cluster.