Is anyone aware of any "managed Rancher" offering (as-service) where one brings the Helm-charts to deploy the workload and pay for the usage, get a consumption dashboard, monitoring dashboard etc. If there are more than one such offering, it'd be great to know of the alternatives. Note that, I am not looking for non-Rancher K8s hosting like EKS, GKE etc., very specifically the Racher distribution of K8s.

Rancher has 3 distros, RKE, RKE2, and K3s. Which one are you looking for? Civo Cloud is based on K3s. Or do you also want the Rancher UI in addition to one of our Kubernetes distros?

Good to know about Civo, however I am interested in managed service built on RKE2. As for Rancher UI, that is not essential, but good to have.

Why does it matter which distribution they are running, if all you want to do is deploy Helm charts? The whole point of a fully managed K8s env is that you don't have to bother with that layer.

My end-customer runs RKE2 on-prem and they insist on sanity test on similar environment. Trying to avoid having to set it up, finetune and manage it in our lab, if possible.

Fine-tune? There's no real fine-tuning needed if all you need is a lab env, it pretty much works out of the box, and there's a 3rd party Ansible role to automate the whole thing

Fine tune for network performance mostly. We do have some specific requirements too from worker nodes (lksctp, dkms...), support of kubeVIP etc. Ideally, we'd like for this to be RKE2 on bare-metal.

I’m not aware of anyone offering a managed Kubernetes service based on RKE2.

Thank you @creamy-pencil-82913