Rancher automatically creates namespaces for each user & project

Rancher
1

Hey,

We have Rancher (version 2.8.5) installed inside our AWS EKS cluster, and it has been running smoothly. User authentication is handled via Azure AD, allowing anyone in the specified Azure AD group to log into the cluster without issues.

However, we’ve noticed that Rancher creates a namespace for each user (e.g., user-XXXX) whenever they log in. Deleting these namespaces does not prevent them from being recreated. We’re unsure of the purpose of these namespaces and would like to disable this behavior unless it’s essential for Rancher’s functionality.

In my previous experience with an on-premise Rancher installation, I did not observe this behavior, although I don’t recall the exact version used.

Additionally, we are seeing similar behavior with project namespaces (e.g., p-XXXX). These namespaces also reappear after being manually deleted, and we are unclear on their necessity since both the cluster and Rancher seem to function correctly without them.

Any insights or guidance on how to disable the automatic creation of these namespaces would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

2

Same problem here! Beckerl-yara, do you fix this problem?

Best Regards.

3

Easy solution: Don’t use the cluster rancher is installed on for anything else. There the user namespaces are required for rancher to keep user state. All workloads should be in downstream clusters. Thats also what the official docs state.