Sorry if this has been asked before, does RKE2 use the in-tree cloud provider (which I think are in maintenance mode(?)) for k8s when I pass in

cloud-provider-name

as an argument?

yes it does! And yeah it’s now in maintenance mode. The only exception to that is when passing

rancher-vsphere

, it’s using the out of tree vsphere cloud provider from rancher: https://github.com/rancher/charts/tree/dev-v2.6/charts/rancher-vsphere-cpi https://github.com/rancher/charts/tree/dev-v2.6/charts/rancher-vsphere-csi

hmm.. okay so, if I want to use the external provider on my RKE2 cluster, I guess I should stop passing in those arguments. Like, there’s no way to feed in a switch that changes it to use the external providers, or to pass in another container or something? I guess that’s what’s kind of confusing about rancher (specifically rke2), the documentation is kind of sprawled over the rancher docs, the rke docs, and rke2 docs

It got sprawled out a bit since rancher provisioning included rke2, but most of the docs should be in docs.rke2.io (although those are generally sparse to be fair). But yes, you’d want to pass in

cloud-provider-name: external

. It’s pretty specifically designed that way currently since there have previously been different flavors of the same external cloud providers and we didn’t want to keep people boxed in. It’s likely this could change in the future to provide something like

cloud-provider-name: external-aws

. If you’d want to see a feature like that, please feel free to open an issue! 🙂

okay, thanks. I’ll try to do some googling for that

external name is required yeah

soo… something like this? https://github.com/rancher/rke2/issues/2965

Haha yep exactly! Good timing a few of you are just doing it at the same time I guess 😄

I’ve said this before, but I think we could (and will have to) manage this better in coordination with RM. We should package charts for AWS, GKE, and so on same as we do for vsphere so that we can start having folks migrate off the in-tree providers before they’re gone.

cool, doesn’t sound too awful. This should be one of those helm charts I just shove in the manifests directory when bootstrapping, haven’t done that pattern much

yeah if we do the aws cloud provider we’d probably do the ebs CSI with it. Same for other cloud providers. No promises though 😉