RKE Kubernetes Installer

RKE (Rancher Kubernetes Engine) is an open-source Kubernetes distribution that runs entirely within Docker containers, designed to simplify the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters on any infrastructure. Created by Rancher Labs (acquired by SUSE in 2020) and first released in 2017 by Darren Shepherd, RKE solves the problem of complex Kubernetes installation by providing a simple, deterministic, container-based approach. Key features include: Docker-based deployment (all Kubernetes components including API server, controller manager, scheduler, etcd, kubelet, and kube-proxy run as Docker containers, eliminating OS-level dependencies), deterministic cluster configuration (a single YAML file defines the entire cluster topology, node roles, network plugin, authentication, and add-ons), infrastructure agnostic (deploying on bare metal, virtual machines, or cloud instances with Docker), RKE1 and RKE2 (RKE1 uses Docker-based runtime while RKE2 is a security-hardened successor using containerd, aligned with CIS benchmarks), node roles (control plane nodes running API server, controller manager, scheduler, and etcd; worker nodes; and etcd-only nodes), cluster operations (initialization, node addition and removal, upgrade, certificate rotation, and etcd backup and restore), add-ons management (deploying ingress controllers, network plugins including Calico, Canal, Flannel, and metrics server via configuration), high availability (multiple control plane nodes with load balancer and multi-node etcd cluster), security and compliance (RBAC, Pod Security Policies, network policies, and CIS benchmark scanning), private registry support, and Terraform integration via Rancher2 provider for Infrastructure as Code.