Overview
What is Rancher Turtles?
The Cluster API Extension for Rancher, also known as SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API, is a Kubernetes Operator that provides integration between Rancher Manager and Cluster API (CAPI) with the aim of bringing full CAPI support to Rancher.
With SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API, you can:
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Automatically import CAPI clusters into Rancher, by installing the Rancher Cluster Agent in CAPI provisioned clusters.
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Implement a GitOps-native workflow to managing Kubernetes clusters in Rancher.
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Simplified management of CAPI Providers using the CAPI Operator.

Navigate the Documentation
To make it easier to get started with SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API, we have structured the documentation to guide you naturally from basic concepts to advanced features. We recommend following along step by step, but if you are already familiar with certain topics, feel free to skip ahead to the relevant sections.
Tutorials
If this is your first time using SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API and you want to get started quickly, we recommend you start here. This will guide you through the process of getting your environment ready for installing SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API, using CAPI to provision a new workload cluster and importing it into Rancher.
Reference
Understand the architecture of SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API, the features, the concept of Certified Providers
and the core concepts of the operator’s features.
User Guide
Learn how to use SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API to manage your CAPI clusters with Rancher, and use more advanced features like ClusterClass
.
Operator Guide
You may want to dive into more advanced maintenance tasks, like customizing your SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API installation, e.g. configuring SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API for more advanced scenarios like air-gapped environments, how to install and manage CAPI Providers or certifying the provider of your choice.
Developer Guide
If you are interested in contributing to SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API, this section will guide you through the process of setting up your development environment and understanding the guidelines for contributing.
Security
SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API meets SLSA Level 3 requirements by running builds on a hardened platform with consistent build processes and provenance distribution. This section contains more details on security-related topics.
Release Notes
Stay up to date with the latest changes, bug fixes and new features in SUSE® Rancher Prime Cluster API here.