Define relation across 'Clusters' from different APIs (CAPI/Rancher/Fleet)

[anmazzotti]

From a Rancher user perspective, distinguishing the various Clusters and understanding their relations is confusing.

So far there are:

• clusters.cluster.x-k8s.io
• clusters.fleet.cattle.io
• clusters.management.cattle.io
• clusters.provisioning.cattle.io

A few problems with these are:

• What is the relation across the Cluster resources from different APIs? What kind of behavior do they implement? For example (CAPI) Cluster annotations and labels are propagated to the related (Fleet) Cluster by CAAPF. What about the (Provisioning) Cluster instead? Does that also work that way?

• Considering propagation rules (or not), what API is the user expected to use? Should the CAPI Cluster be the only source of truth? Are there occasions where the (Provisioning) Cluster needs a different set of labels or to be directly edited by the user to access features that have nothing to do with CAPI?

CC @mantis-toboggan-md as reporter

[mantis-toboggan-md]

Here's a bit more context on what is currently in the UI:

The home page cluster table contains information from clusters.management.cattle.io and clusters.provisioning.cattle.io. Day 2 ops cannot be performed from this view

The cluster management table also contains information from both clusters.management.cattle.io and clusters.provisioning.cattle.io. Editing Rancher-provisioned rke2/k3s clusters from here will modify the provisioning cluster object. Editing imported and kontainer clusters from this view will modify the clusters.management.cattle.io object via Norman

The capi cluster list view uses information from clusters.cluster.x-k8s.io only. It does not currently allow editing

The fleet cluster list contains information from clusters.fleet.cattle.io. Note that this one is scoped by fleet workspace as well (dropdown in the upper left of the page), while the other lists are not namespace-scoped.

[anmazzotti]

Maybe this page can be reused/updated https://extensions.rancher.io/internal/code-base-works/cluster-management-resources#cluster-resources