Hi. A curious thought occurred to me, for a way of bending the normal Rancher/RKE2 setup. Normally I would just test it out, but since I am drowning in projects, both private and work, I thought I'd first check if anybody with more insight thinks it is possible. Rancher's architecture works great, where the management interface sits in peace on its own cluster and then manages a downstream cluster, which is a completely self contained cluster. BUT, is it possible to make it function like some of the other platforms? AKS,EKS, GKE, K0smotron, etc. Host the control planes for the downstream cluster, away from the cluster, in some cases on a separate Kubernetes cluster. The way I see this being done, if possible, is to run RKE2 pods as control-plane/etcd in the upstream cluster, where the worker nodes then connect to them from wherever they are, over VLAN, VPN, direct. My thumbsucking theory says it should be possible, with rke2 being packaged as a contianer... or am I smoking something? Edit: Not sure if this actually qualifies as random topic or on-topic here.

Maybe this: SUSE Rancher Prime 2.8.6, CLASTIX Kamaji 1.0.0 | Efficient Multi-Tenancy with CLASTIX Kamaji and SUSE Rancher Prime

Thanks for this. I see it does largely what I mentioned, but notice it prefers the upstream base kubernetes components and kubeadm. This moves away from my hope to use features that I enjoy from RKE2 (etcd snapshots, upgrade controller, etc.) Feel free to correct me, if not.