How are you using vanilla Kubernetes? I've tried provisioning vanilla K8s on bare metal clusters and I found it to be pure PITA, even with Kubespray.

Rancher's RKE is the first installer I've come across that "just works". Run rke up against a cluster.yml and within minutes you have a HA cluster with ingress ready to rock. K3S is also looking quite good.

In contrast I've spent days staring down the abyss of vanilla K8s. If you have good alternatives for launching K8S on bare metal/on-prem clusters, would be game to try.

I stood up a vanilla baremetal cluster (on the latest Ubuntu) a few days back using Kubeadm ... it was fairly trivial to do. I used the NGINX Ingress and it was also generally straightforward (maybe took an hour or two to understand what was going on). Curious what we did different?

I saw Rancher's offering afterwards and it does look really slick .. the UI is bloody awesome. Wish I could get it for regular kubernetes.

Kubeadm is the "official" and certified tool, not Kubespray. It is easily scripted as well. If you're used to graphical installers though and don't like automation then by all means continue to use Rancher.

Over half a billion of USD looks like real value to me, I wish I could make that much with vanilla Kubernetes and Helm charts. Let's be respectful for Rancher's fantastic exit.

They recently when through a Series D round for $75 million, but yet you believe they have half a billion in the bank? They were on their last leg begging for seed money to keep them afloat.

That's a lower estimate of the acquisition based on the info about this deal linked elsewhere in the thread and on the net.

Did they publicly announce the finances? They wouldn't have sold to SUSE unless their investors were getting desperate for some return.

The real value is the Install / Life Cycle orchestration - vanilla K8S has really marked that firmly as "not their problem" - which is the correct thing for them to do.

Cluster API should hopefully obsolete that problem, sooner rather than later.

Hopefully, but Cluster API relies on something like Rancher (or AKS/EkS/GKE) to do the deployment underneath it - it still kind of outsources the life cycle.

What does life cycle orchestration mean?

Replacing nodes, helping repairing broken things, upgrading the control plane, upgrading etcd etc.

All easily done using Helm and kubeadm.

Some of that is easily done with Helm and kubeadm, but not all of it, and definitely doesn't scale as you grow the number and size of the clusters running.

You clearly haven't used or heard of kubeadm, which is a certified installer and lifecycle tool from CNCF.

Rancher only sells support, which includes all things related to Kubernetes, not only their products