Cluster Administration

After you provision a cluster in Rancher, you can begin using powerful Kubernetes features to deploy and scale your containerized applications in development, testing, or production environments.

This section assumes a basic familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes. For a brief explanation of how Kubernetes components work together, refer to the concepts page.

Managing Clusters in Rancher

After clusters have been provisioned into Rancher, cluster owners will need to manage these clusters. There are many different options of how to manage your cluster.

Action	Rancher Launched Kubernetes Clusters	EKS, GKE and AKS Clusters¹	Other Hosted Kubernetes Clusters	Non-EKS or GKE Registered Clusters
Using kubectl and a kubeconfig file to Access a Cluster	✓	✓	✓	✓
Managing Cluster Members	✓	✓	✓	✓
Editing and Upgrading Clusters	✓	✓	✓	✓²
Managing Nodes	✓	✓	✓	✓³
Managing Persistent Volumes and Storage Classes	✓	✓	✓	✓
Managing Projects, Namespaces and Workloads	✓	✓	✓	✓
Using App Catalogs	✓	✓	✓	✓
Configuring Tools (Alerts, Notifiers, Monitoring, Logging, Istio)	✓	✓	✓	✓
Running Security Scans	✓	✓	✓	✓
Ability to rotate certificates	✓	✓
Ability to backup and restore Rancher-launched clusters	✓	✓		✓⁴
Cleaning Kubernetes components when clusters are no longer reachable from Rancher	✓
Configuring Pod Security Policies	✓	✓

Action

Rancher Launched Kubernetes Clusters

EKS, GKE and AKS Clusters¹

Other Hosted Kubernetes Clusters

Non-EKS or GKE Registered Clusters

Using kubectl and a kubeconfig file to Access a Cluster

✓

Managing Cluster Members

✓

Editing and Upgrading Clusters

✓

✓²

Managing Nodes

✓

✓³

Managing Persistent Volumes and Storage Classes

✓

Managing Projects, Namespaces and Workloads

✓

Using App Catalogs

✓

Configuring Tools (Alerts, Notifiers, Monitoring, Logging, Istio)

✓

Running Security Scans

✓

Ability to rotate certificates

✓

Ability to backup and restore Rancher-launched clusters

✓

✓⁴

Cleaning Kubernetes components when clusters are no longer reachable from Rancher

✓

Configuring Pod Security Policies

✓

Registered EKS, GKE and AKS clusters have the same options available as EKS, GKE and AKS clusters created from the Rancher UI. The difference is that when a registered cluster is deleted from the Rancher UI, it is not destroyed.
Cluster configuration options can’t be edited for registered clusters, except for K3s and RKE2 clusters.
For registered cluster nodes, the Rancher UI exposes the ability to cordon, drain, and edit the node.
For registered clusters using etcd as a control plane, snapshots must be taken manually outside of the Rancher UI to use for backup and recovery.

Configuring Tools

Rancher contains a variety of tools that aren’t included in Kubernetes to assist in your DevOps operations. Rancher can integrate with external services to help your clusters run more efficiently. Tools are divided into the following categories:

Alerts
Notifiers
Logging
Monitoring
Istio Service Mesh
OPA Gatekeeper

Tools can be installed through Apps.