Fleet by Rancher is a GitOps tool designed to manage large sets of Kubernetes clusters efficiently. In simple words, it can be used to take Kubernetes manifests from any Git repo & apply them to the cluster automatically. It can also manage Helm Charts, build Kustomize and even apply combinations of all three.
Architecture
The diagram below is a simplification of what actually happens behind the scenes, see the actual docs for a more detailed description.
flowchart TB gr[Git Repo] subgraph cluster[Kubernetes Cluster] subgraph fc[Fleet Controller] fgc(Fleet Git Cloner) -->|create bundle| fa fa(Fleet Apply) end subgraph tn[Tenant Namespace] grcrd([GitRepo CRD]) bundle([Bundle]) --> hc subgraph hc[App Managed by GitOps] direction BT manif[Manifests] end end end fa --> bundle fgc ---> gr gr -.-> grcrd grcrd -.-> fc
Usage
To apply manifests from a repo, create a GitRepo
CRD. You can do this either manually, or using the Rancher Continuous Delivery Tab.
For more detailed examples on how to use Fleets full functionality, please see the fleet-examples repo.