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Rancher Rackspace Spot Driver

Deploy Kubernetes clusters on Rackspace Spot instances — directly from the Rancher UI.

The Rancher Rackspace Spot Driver is a kontainer-engine plugin that lets you provision, manage, and delete Rackspace Spot CloudSpaces without leaving Rancher. Spot instances give you high-performance compute at significantly reduced cost, with optional on-demand node pools for workloads that need guaranteed capacity.

Features

  • One-click provisioning

    Create a fully managed Kubernetes cluster on Rackspace Spot from the Rancher UI in minutes.

  • Cost-efficient spot nodes

    Set a bid price and let Rackspace Spot fill your node pool with spare capacity — pay a fraction of on-demand rates.

  • Autoscaling built-in

    Configure min/max node counts per pool and let the cluster scale automatically with your workload.

  • Hybrid node pools

    Pair a spot pool with an optional on-demand pool for workloads that require guaranteed availability.

  • Kubernetes version management

    Select your Kubernetes version at creation time and upgrade in-place through the standard Rancher UI.

  • Secure by default

    Credentials are stored as Rancher secrets. The driver creates a scoped rancher service account with the minimum required permissions.

Quick start

  1. In Rancher, go to ☰ → Extensions
  2. Click ⋮ → Manage Extension Repositories → Create
  3. Set Name to rackspace-spot and URL to https://teamzuzu.github.io/rancher-rackspace-spot-driver
  4. Click Create, then go to ☰ → Extensions → Available
  5. Find Rackspace Spot and click Install

Or via Helm:

helm repo add rackspace-spot https://teamzuzu.github.io/rancher-rackspace-spot-driver
helm repo update
helm install rackspacespot rackspace-spot/rackspacespot \
  --namespace cattle-ui-plugin-system --create-namespace
  1. Go to Cluster Management → Create
  2. Select Rackspace Spot from the driver list
  3. Enter your Refresh Token and Organization
  4. Configure node pools and click Create

Full details

See the Installation guide for step-by-step instructions, and the Configuration reference for all available options.

Architecture

Rancher UI
    │
    ▼
rancher-rackspace-spot-driver  (gRPC plugin)
    │
    ├── Rackspace Spot API
    │       ├── CloudSpace (managed control plane)
    │       ├── SpotNodePool
    │       └── OnDemandNodePool
    │
    └── Cluster kubeconfig → Rancher service account bootstrap

The driver runs as a sidecar process inside the Rancher container. Rancher calls it over a local gRPC socket whenever you create, update, or delete a cluster.

Requirements

Requirement Version
Rancher ≥ 2.10
Rackspace Spot account Any
Go (to build from source) ≥ 1.24

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE for details.