Sophia Elliott 
- RKE2 Government is in technical preview
- SELinux policies are installed and applied during standard installation
- RGS says the build is FIPS 140-3 certified, validated and verified
Rancher Government Solutions customers can now access a version of the company’s RKE2 Kubernetes distribution that ships preconfigured to meet the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guide requirements, RGS said Tuesday.
Called RKE2 Government, the RGS-provided build is available exclusively to the company’s customers and is currently in technical preview. Kubernetes is an open-source platform used to automate the deployment and management of containerized applications, and RKE2 is RGS’ distribution of the platform built for U.S. government environments.
What Does RKE2 Government Include?
According to RGS, the build applies required STIG configuration settings for the Kubernetes control plane and supporting components automatically, with no additional hardening steps required from users. Its other features include:
- SELinux integration: Security-Enhanced Linux policies are installed and applied during the standard installation process, without separate policy packages.
- FIPS 140-3 cryptography: RGS says the build is certified, validated and verified under the Federal Information Processing Standard 140-3 by accredited third-party assessors.
- Rancher compatibility: The build is designed and tested both to deploy the Rancher management platform and to run as a downstream cluster managed by Rancher, with Pod Security Admission configuration handled as part of the platform.
- Hardened container images: The distribution uses container images built to limit exposure to known vulnerabilities.
RKE2 Government includes a supported containerd runtime and does not require the Docker container runtime. RGS said the build is not tied to a specific operating system, tooling or Kubernetes management platform, and that it remains a Cloud Native Computing Foundation-conformant distribution aligned with upstream Kubernetes.
The company said its default settings are designed to pass RKE2 STIG requirements and Center for Internet Security Kubernetes benchmarks.
What Other Government-Focused Work Has RGS Pursued?
In July, Advanced Micro Devices and RGS partnered on a hardened version of Kubernetes to support the AI requirements of the U.S. government and allied partners. The collaboration includes AMD Instinct MI355X-based AI infrastructure for government, high-performance computing and research use cases.
In 2025, RGS teamed with Norseman Defense Technologies to develop Odin’s Edge, an AI-powered cloud-native appliance for defense, intelligence and emergency response use in austere environments. That March, the company launched IC Cloud Support, a support offering for customers managing Kubernetes in classified cloud regions, including intelligence community users.
In November 2024, RGS partnered with Buoyant, creator of the open-source service mesh Linkerd, to provide Kubernetes management services to federal agencies.
DISA cleared and issued the STIG for RKE2 in late 2022, months after validating the STIG for RGS’ Rancher Multi-cluster Manager version 2.6.
