Rancher is the enterprise computing platform to run Kubernetes on-premises, in the cloud and at the edge. It addresses the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters everywhere. Rancher also provides IT operators and development teams with integrated tools for building, deploying, and running cloud-native workloads.
Rancher not only deploys production-grade Kubernetes clusters from data center to cloud to the edge, it also unites them with centralized authentication, access control and observability. Rancher lets you streamline cluster deployment on bare metal, edge devices, private clouds, public clouds, or vSphere and secure them using global security policies. Use Helm or Rancher App Catalog to deploy and manage applications across any or all these environments, ensuring multi-cluster consistency with a single deployment.
How Rancher delivers production-grade Kubernetes at scale

Figure 2. Rancher's recipe for production quality Kubernetes at scale
- Certified Kubernetes Distributions—Rancher supports any certified Kubernetes distribution. For on-premises workloads, Rancher offers the RKE - a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution that runs entirely within Docker containers. It works on bare-metal and virtualized servers. RKE solves the problem of installation complexity, a common issue in the Kubernetes community. With RKE, the installation and operation of Kubernetes is both simplified and easily automated, and it is entirely independent of the operating system.
For the public cloud, all the major distributions are supported, including EKS, AKS, and GKE. For edge, branch and desktop workloads Rancher offers K3s, a certified lightweight distribution of Kubernetes.
- Simplified Cluster Operations—Rancher provides simple, consistent cluster operations including provisioning, version management, visibility and diagnostics, monitoring and alerting, and centralized audit.
- Security, Policy, and User Management—Rancher lets you automate processes and applies a consistent set of user access and security policies for all your clusters, no matter where they are running.
- Shared Tools and Services—Rancher provides a rich catalog of services for building, deploying, and scaling containerized applications, including app packaging, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, and service mesh.