actually that was one consideration... just manually create a gke cluster just to get rancher server up and running. lol. but when I say I'm a noob, I mean, I'm not even a *nix dude (I just happen to have been in IT since creating the first national ISP in Canada and played with large deployments, enterprise storage, compute and network, vmware admin and sales guy for long while) k8s just seems like natural progression that I was able to pick up the concepts easy... but because one thing I've learned is leaving a repeatable process and to share knowledge (terraform from scratch would be best in that case) I decided to go with what I know and deploy it as a gcp vm instance.
I'm truly winging it here... although I