Architecture

This section focuses on the Rancher server and its components and how Rancher communicates with downstream Kubernetes clusters.

For information on the different ways that Rancher can be installed, refer to the overview of installation options.

For a list of main features of the Rancher API server, refer to the overview section.

For guidance about setting up the underlying infrastructure for the Rancher server, refer to the architecture recommendations.

note

This section assumes a basic familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes. For a brief explanation of how Kubernetes components work together, refer to the concepts page.