Setting up the Google Compute Engine Cloud Provider

In this section, you'll learn how to enable the Google Compute Engine (GCE) cloud provider for custom clusters in Rancher. A custom cluster is one in which Rancher installs Kubernetes on existing nodes.

The official Kubernetes documentation for the GCE cloud provider is here.

Prerequisites:

The service account of Identity and API access on GCE needs the Computer Admin permission.

If you are using Calico,

1. Click ☰ > Cluster Management.

2. On the Clusters page, go to the custom cluster and click *⋮ > Edit YAML. Enter the following configuration:

   rancher_kubernetes_engine_config:
     cloud_provider:
       name: gce
       customCloudProvider: |-
         [Global]
         project-id=<your project ID, optional>
         network-name=<your network, optional if using default network>
         subnetwork-name=<your subnetwork of the above network, optional if using default network>
         node-instance-prefix=<your instance group name/your instance name specific prefix, required>
         node-tags=<your network tags, must patch one or some tags, required>
     network:
       options:
         calico_cloud_provider: "gce"
       plugin: "calico"

If you are using Canal or Flannel,

1. Click ☰ > Cluster Management.

2. On the Clusters page, go to the custom cluster and click *⋮ > Edit YAML. Enter the following configuration:

   rancher_kubernetes_engine_config:
     cloud_provider:
       name: gce
       customCloudProvider: |-
         [Global]
         project-id=<your project ID, optional>
         network-name=<your network, optional if using default network>
         subnetwork-name=<your subnetwork of the above network, optional if using default network>
         node-instance-prefix=<your instance group name/your instance name specific prefix, required>
         node-tags=<your network tags, must patch one or some tags, required>
     services:
       kube_controller:
         extra_args:
           configure-cloud-routes: true # we need to allow the cloud provider configure the routes for the hosts