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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