End-to-End Kubernetes with Rancher, RKE2, K3s, Fleet, Longhorn, and NeuVector

RKE: The Distribution that Started it All

In 2018, Rancher Labs introduced Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) as a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution. RKE, sometimes called RKE1, was designed to simplify K8s deployments by using Docker at two levels:

• At the first level, as the runtime for Kubernetes components: RKE runs all Kubernetes components (e.g., kube-apiserver, kube-controller-manager, kube-scheduler, etcd) as Docker containers.
• At the second level, as a runtime for user workloads: RKE allows users to deploy applications as Docker containers on Kubernetes clusters.