While hacking around Rancher Desktop I wanted to check what are the resources that compose a single node cluster.
k3d cluster create k3d-my-singlenode-cluster
That new cluster spans over two docker containers
The first container k3d-k3d-my-singlenode-cluster-serverlb is based on the ghcr.io/k3d-io/k3d-proxy:5.6.0 proxy image.
It seems to be basically a nginx-proxy exposing ports 6443 and 80
The second one k3d-k3d-my-singlenode-cluster-server-0 is based on the docker.io/rancher/k3s:v1.27.4-k3s1 k3s image. That’s the master / control-plane and I guess also acts as the worker
In terms of networking it opens
172.18.0.2 for control-plane/master (running 7 pods) and 172.18.0.3 for load balancer.
Now, from Kubernetes perspective, there is just one cluster running one single node grouping 7 containers.
There’s one called traefix that has the external ip associated with this control-plane node and some port mappings
Apparently, other k8s objects like Scaled objects, Service account, and Virtual service remain untouched.