RKE
More info
- Creator
- Rancher Labs
- Released
- 2017
- Type
- Kubernetes distribution
- Owner
- SUSE
Rancher Kubernetes Engine: a distribution that runs the entire control plane in Docker containers, so a cluster needs nothing but Docker on the nodes.
When Kubernetes was young its installation was notoriously fiddly. Rancher Labs' 2017 answer was RKE: package every component — api-server, etcd, scheduler — as Docker containers driven by a single YAML file. The only prerequisite on the nodes was Docker, and a cluster came up in minutes.
RKE2 (also called RKE Government) rebuilt it for security: containerd instead of Docker, CIS-hardened and FIPS-capable. SUSE bought Rancher in 2020 and now ships both RKE and its lighter sibling k3s.