Continental Innovates with Rancher and Kubernetes
This page is intended to answer questions about what happens if you don’t want Rancher anymore, if you don’t want a cluster to be managed by Rancher anymore, or if the Rancher server is deleted.
If Rancher is ever deleted or unrecoverable, all workloads in the downstream Kubernetes clusters managed by Rancher will continue to function as normal.
The capability to access a downstream cluster without Rancher depends on the type of cluster and the way that the cluster was created. To summarize:
If you installed Rancher on a Kubernetes cluster, remove Rancher by using the System Tools with the remove subcommand.
remove
If you installed Rancher with Docker, you can uninstall Rancher by removing the single Docker container that it runs in.
Imported clusters will not be affected by Rancher being removed. For other types of clusters, refer to the section on accessing downstream clusters when Rancher is removed.
If an imported cluster is deleted from the Rancher UI, the cluster is detached from Rancher, leaving it intact and accessible by the same methods that were used to access it before it was imported into Rancher.
To detach the cluster,
Result: The imported cluster is detached from Rancher and functions normally outside of Rancher.
At this time, there is no functionality to detach these clusters from Rancher. In this context, “detach” is defined as the ability to remove Rancher components from the cluster and manage access to the cluster independently of Rancher.
The capability to manage these clusters without Rancher is being tracked in this issue.
For information about how to access clusters if the Rancher server is deleted, refer to this section.