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 Clusters1

Using kubectl and a kubeconfig file to Access a Cluster

Managing Cluster Members

Editing and Upgrading Clusters

Managing Nodes

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

Cleaning Kubernetes components when clusters are no longer reachable from Rancher

  1. Registered EKS clusters have the same options available as EKS clusters created from the Rancher UI. The difference is that when a registered cluster is deleted from the Rancher UI, it is not destroyed.

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

Tools can be installed through Apps.