Rancher GCP Quick Start Guide

The following steps will quickly deploy a Rancher server on GCP in a single-node K3s Kubernetes cluster, with a single-node downstream Kubernetes cluster attached.

Note: The intent of these guides is to quickly launch a sandbox that you can use to evaluate Rancher. These guides are not intended for production environments. For comprehensive setup instructions, see Installation.

Prerequisites

Note Deploying to Google GCP will incur charges.

• Google GCP Account: A Google GCP Account is required to create resources for deploying Rancher and Kubernetes.
• Google GCP Project: Use this link to follow a tutorial to create a GCP Project if you don't have one yet.
• Google GCP Service Account: Use this link and follow instructions to create a GCP service account and token file.
• Terraform: Used to provision the server and cluster in Google GCP.

Getting Started

1. Clone Rancher Quickstart to a folder using git clone https://github.com/rancher/quickstart.

2. Go into the GCP folder containing the Terraform files by executing cd quickstart/rancher/gcp.

3. Rename the terraform.tfvars.example file to terraform.tfvars.

4. Edit terraform.tfvars and customize the following variables:

   • gcp_account_json - GCP service account file path and file name
   • rancher_server_admin_password - Admin password for created Rancher server

5. Optional: Modify optional variables within terraform.tfvars. See the Quickstart Readme and the GCP Quickstart Readme for more information. Suggestions include:

   - `gcp_region` - Google GCP region, choose the closest instead of the default (`us-east4`)
   - `gcp_zone` - Google GCP zone, choose the closest instead of the default (`us-east4-a`)
   - `prefix` - Prefix for all created resources
   - `machine_type` - Compute instance size used, minimum is `n1-standard-1` but `n1-standard-2` or `n1-standard-4` could be used if within budget

6. Run terraform init.

7. To initiate the creation of the environment, run terraform apply --auto-approve. Then wait for output similar to the following:

   Apply complete! Resources: 16 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.
   
   Outputs:
   
   rancher_node_ip = xx.xx.xx.xx
   rancher_server_url = https://rancher.xx.xx.xx.xx.sslip.io
   workload_node_ip = yy.yy.yy.yy

8. Paste the rancher_server_url from the output above into the browser. Log in when prompted (default username is admin, use the password set in rancher_server_admin_password).

9. ssh to the Rancher Server using the id_rsa key generated in quickstart/rancher/gcp.

Result

Two Kubernetes clusters are deployed into your GCP account, one running Rancher Server and the other ready for experimentation deployments. Please note that while this setup is a great way to explore Rancher functionality, a production setup should follow our high availability setup guidelines. SSH keys for the VMs are auto-generated and stored in the module directory.

What's Next?

Use Rancher to create a deployment. For more information, see Creating Deployments.

Destroying the Environment

1. From the quickstart/rancher/gcp folder, execute terraform destroy --auto-approve.

2. Wait for confirmation that all resources have been destroyed.