Quickstart examples for Rancher

Quickly stand up an HA-style Rancher management server in your infrastructure provider of choice.

Intended for experimentation/evaluation ONLY.

You will be responsible for any and all infrastructure costs incurred by these resources. As a result, this repository minimizes costs by standing up the minimum required resources for a given provider. Use Vagrant to run Rancher locally and avoid cloud costs.

Local quickstart

A local quickstart is provided in the form of Vagrant configuration.

The Vagrant quickstart does not currently follow Rancher best practices for installing a Rancher management server. Use this configuration only to evaluate the features of Rancher. See cloud provider quickstarts for an HA foundation according to Rancher installation best practices.

Requirements - Vagrant (local)

• Vagrant
• VirtualBox
• 6GB unused RAM

Using Vagrant quickstart

See /vagrant for details on usage and settings.

Cloud quickstart

Quickstarts are provided for:

• Amazon Web Services (aws)
• Microsoft Azure Cloud (azure)
• Microsoft Azure Cloud with Windows nodes (azure-windows)
• DigitalOcean (do)
• Google Cloud Platform (gcp)
• Hetzner Cloud (hcloud)
• Linode (linode)
• Scaleway (scw)

You will be responsible for any and all infrastructure costs incurred by these resources.

Each quickstart will install Rancher on a single-node RKE cluster, then will provision another single-node workload cluster using a Custom cluster in Rancher. This setup provides easy access to the core Rancher functionality while establishing a foundation that can be easily expanded to a full HA Rancher server.

Requirements - Cloud

• Terraform >=1.0.0
• Credentials for the cloud provider used for the quickstart

Deploy

To begin with any quickstart, perform the following steps:

1. Clone or download this repository to a local folder
2. Choose a cloud provider and navigate into the provider's folder
3. Copy or rename terraform.tfvars.example to terraform.tfvars and fill in all required variables
4. Run terraform init
5. Run terraform apply

When provisioning has finished, terraform will output the URL to connect to the Rancher server. Two sets of Kubernetes configurations will also be generated:

• kube_config_server.yaml contains credentials to access the RKE cluster supporting the Rancher server
• kube_config_workload.yaml contains credentials to access the provisioned workload cluster

For more details on each cloud provider, refer to the documentation in their respective folders.

Remove

When you're finished exploring the Rancher server, use terraform to tear down all resources in the quickstart.

NOTE: Any resources not provisioned by the quickstart are not guaranteed to be destroyed when tearing down the quickstart. Make sure you tear down any resources you provisioned manually before running the destroy command.

Run terraform destroy -auto-approve to remove all resources without prompting for confirmation.