Rancher/Rancher RKE

What is the difference?

Rancher is a production cluster provisioner/manager.

Rancher RKE is a dockerised version of kubernetes. Standalone Rancher RKE clusters can be built using a binary CLI. The desired cluster state is specified by a configuration file, cluster.yml, which minimally looks something like e.g.

nodes:
  - address: 1.2.3.4
    user: ubuntu
    role:
      - controlplane
      - etcd
      - worker

where the node hostname (address), user and roles (the kubernetes services to be installed on this node) are specified. The full list of options are listed here here.

Rancher uses Rancher RKE to create clusters. Clusters created with Rancher RKE outside of Rancher can also be imported into Rancher.

Provisioning a cluster using cloud resources

To allow Rancher to provision host infrastructure, the corresponding node-driver must be enabled.

To allow a cluster created with RKE to provision cloud resources like e.g. load balancers and volumes, the cloud_provider section of the RKE cluster must be populated. See here for more information.