Using rancher to provision machines on imported cluster

Rancher 2.x
1

:wave: Hi all. I have a cluster I would like to import to rancher. I would also like to leverage ranchers ability to provision machines using a custom nodedriver I have. Is this possible? Am I thinking about rancher wrong in using it as almost a custom EKS/GKE solution?

2

Unfortunately, this is not possible. A cluster can be either custom or imported, and an imported cluster cannot become custom.
custom clusters have more things happening with them:

  • Rancher maintains a CR called machine for each custom cluster node, with cluster configuration information inside of them (which it does not have for imported clusters).
  • Rancher also deploys something called rancher-system-agent on custom clusters, but not on imported clusters, making Rancher able to control the node (basically, running commands on it). This is not the case for imported clusters, for which Rancher does not control the node, it only talks to the Kubernetes API.