About Rancher Worker

Rancher is an open-source platform for managing Kubernetes clusters. It simplifies deploying, managing, and scaling Kubernetes across multiple infrastructures. A Rancher worker node is a server/node that runs application workloads (i.e., your pods, containers), reports health and resource status to the control plane and communicates with the control plane to receive instructions on what to run.

Components of a Rancher Worker Node:

• Kubelet - runs on every Kubernetes node and registers the node with the control plane and ensures containers are running in the desired state.

• Container Runtime - runs the actual containers.

• Kube-proxy - handles network routing and forwarding within the cluster and ensures that each node knows how to access services and pods across the cluster.

• CNI Plugin - manages networking between pods.

• Rancher Agent - installed by Rancher during node registration and connects the node to the Rancher server and handles communication between the Rancher control plane and the worker node.

• System Pods - may include metrics server, logging agents, monitoring agents, and other Rancher add-ons depending on your cluster setup.