[Murrawhip]

I currently use kubeadm for our small business cluster. 1 master and 2 nodes. We haven't put a ton into it but it seems to be running pretty well so far. Have done an upgrade from 1.7 to 1.9 without much/any downtime. Is there much more of a learning curve with Rancher?

[Birch-san]

Rancher 1 is extremely easy to learn. Generally you do everything from the UI (I only use the CLI to view combined logs). High-availability is easy too; they provide a load-balancer (haproxy) with good UI integration.

Rancher 2 has a nicer UI and is more tightly related to Kubernetes. But there are moreorless zero docs, so be careful.

With either version: it's trivial to grab the master and node Docker images, and deploy them to your local machine to have a play.