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In today’s market, software controls software. Whether you’re deploying workloads from your CI/CD system or standing up whole clusters in the cloud, you need a solution that puts you in control with an API that doesn’t hold anything back.
When you use native Kubernetes, you have the fastest path to upgrades and new features. You know that you’re using the software in the way its designers intended, and you have all of the benefits that come from it being open source, with the entire community behind it.
Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE) is 100% upstream Kubernetes, packaged in Docker containers. Using containers removes additional host dependencies - you can provision any Linux host with a supported version of Docker and join it to a Kubernetes cluster on both ARM and x86 architectures. Using upstream Kubernetes means that you can use all alpha, beta, and production features as soon as they’re available.
Rancher is an API-first product. Everything that you can do through the UI you can also do via the RESTful API. This opens up endless possibilities for programmatically interacting with your clusters, from provisioning hosts, to installing Kubernetes, to deploying workloads via kubectl, to controlling applications launched via the Application Catalog. Plug it into your CI/CD system, or build a self-service provisioning portal for your users. What you can do is only limited by your imagination.
For easy access to Rancher-specific features, the Rancher CLI is available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Rancher already acts as an auth proxy for the Kubernetes clusters, and when you use the Rancher CLI, it will also proxy all kubectl commands to the cluster. This means that you don’t have to provide a kubectl config file alongside a Rancher API key. With one API key you can control Rancher and every Kubernetes cluster to which you have access.
When working with an API as powerful as Rancher’s, it can be difficult to find the correct path or options for a particular instruction. Rancher’s user interface gives a convenient “View in API” menu option for every visual component. Selecting this brings you directly to the API path for that object, and that page includes tools to help construct and test API calls for use with an external application. This dramatically shortens the time to market for any external software that interacts directly with the Rancher API.