The default network plugin (canal) did not work for me (some strange error), switching to Weave fixed the problem. Somehow RKE fails when your ssh-key is added to an ssh-agent, you need to add the "--ssh-agent-auth" flag to RKE to make it work.

The rest worked great and fast (~5 minutes I'd say). I am currently looking into persistent volume solutions, Rook.io looks good but is still beta. Ingress is another thing I have to look into, probably just port forwarding from my router to one of the nodes running the controller.

The nodes are Ubuntu 16.04 with docker installed from the repos.

Odd, the default according to the docs is now flannel. Note that that is the default choice _if you ask for network in your configuration_, otherwise it doesn't do any (this caught me out).

Rook is doing OK for me so far, but be warned, the api is seemingly quite volatile at the moment

For ingress on bare metal (I assume that is what you are using), either nginx-ingress (for rest protocols) or metallb for arbitrary ones.