The balance between modernizing IT infrastructure and preserving existing investments presents a major concern for the U.S. Government. By allowing customers to leverage new technologies without the constraints of vendor lock-in or hardware limitations, RGS is transforming the approach to IT modernization, ensuring a future-proof IT environment with unparalleled flexibility and choice.

Greetings! Let's dive into Rancher's Harvester product and explore some of the synergies that emerge when we combine the infrastructure and orchestration layers using a unified API. That unified API is the Kubernetes API. So, instead of using the usual cloud-agnostic tools in our toolbox (Terraform, Ansible, etc), we are going to try to use ONLY Kubernetes to deploy a guest RKE2 cluster onto Harvester and then install Rancher Multi-cluster Manager on that cluster. Ideally we do this with minimal steps and avoid usage of complex bash scripts.

The United States Army’s outdated command and control (C2) infrastructure limits its operational efficiency, particularly in critical combat scenarios. The agency’s “C2 Fix” initiative aims to address these issues by simplifying network infrastructure across Army formations. With over 85% of the Army’s units still relying on less agile legacy systems, the current C2 framework lacks the flexibility to support rapid, secure, and scalable communications between intelligence, sustainment, and tactical operations.      

In this repo, we're going to cover the creation of a RKE2 cluster into Harvester using an airgapped process (aka Bootstrap!). We'll follow that up by installing Rancher on top of RKE2. We're going to do all of this using Terraform. Terraform allows us to declaratively define our environment in code and then create that environment in a straight-forward (and sustainable) way.