Rancher

Official download

Runs on dke-mgmt alongside ArgoCD, providing fleet-level cluster management — a single UI/API to see cluster health, RBAC, and workloads across every registered cluster, independent of ArgoCD's own (delivery-focused) view.

Importing a new cluster

Rancher's standard "import existing cluster" flow applies a Rancher agent manifest into the target cluster, which registers it and establishes an outbound connection back to Rancher (no inbound connectivity to the workload cluster required — useful since most dke-* clusters aren't directly reachable from outside the lab network). Do this as part of cluster bootstrap, alongside the ArgoCD and Vault registration steps, so a new cluster is fully onboarded in one pass rather than partially set up and forgotten.

Relationship to ArgoCD

Rancher and ArgoCD are complementary, not redundant: Rancher answers "what clusters exist and are they healthy," ArgoCD answers "what's supposed to be running in them and is it in sync." A cluster can show healthy in Rancher while an ArgoCD Application on it is OutOfSync — check both when something's wrong, not just one.