I feel I'm about to ask a stupid question, but I couldn't find the answer... Why not use Rancher only on my local environment, and have the downstream Kubernetes cluster running my production workloads in the cloud? How would Rancher not being always available affect my production workload?

do you have a drawing or other sort of example write up of what you’re trying to accomplish? rancher has multiple services and with the federation they can talk one to the other on the same box or different clusters. what are you trying to accomplish? https://ranchermanager.docs.rancher.com/reference-guides/rancher-manager-architecture/rancher-server-and-components

@curved-librarian-75598 thanks for answering. As in that diagram, I want to install the downstream cluster in a proper HA setting with k3s. But I want to keep rancher only on my pc with a single docker container. The reason is to save resources/money. Is there any reason why I shouldn't do that? What sort of task does rancher perform that it must always stay online along with the downstream cluster?