Rancher/RKE/K3s to AKS migration expertise. Triggers on "Rancher", "RKE", "K3s", "cattle.io", "Fleet".
| Rancher Concept | AKS Equivalent |
|---|---|
cattle.io CRDs (Clusters, Projects, Apps) | Remove — AKS uses Azure Resource Manager for cluster management |
cattle-system namespace | Remove — not needed on AKS |
cattle-fleet-* namespaces | Remove or replace with Flux/ArgoCD namespaces |
Rancher system agents (cattle-node-agent, cattle-cluster-agent) | Remove — AKS manages node agents natively |
management.cattle.io resources | Remove — use Azure portal / CLI for cluster management |
| Rancher Concept | AKS Equivalent |
|---|---|
Fleet (fleet.cattle.io) | Flux v2 (AKS GitOps extension) or ArgoCD |
Fleet GitRepo CRD | Flux GitRepository + Kustomization CRDs |
Fleet Bundle CRD | Flux HelmRelease or Kustomization |
| Fleet cluster groups / selectors | Flux multi-cluster with AKS Fleet Manager |
Fleet BundleDeployment | Flux Kustomization with target namespace |
| Rancher Concept | AKS Equivalent |
|---|---|
| Rancher Monitoring (Prometheus Operator stack) | Azure Monitor Container Insights + managed Prometheus |
| Rancher Grafana dashboards | Azure Monitor workbooks or Azure Managed Grafana |
| Rancher Logging (Banzai Logging Operator) | Azure Monitor agent (Container Insights) |
| Rancher Alerting | Azure Monitor alerts |
| Rancher Istio integration | Azure Service Mesh (Istio-based AKS add-on) |
| Rancher Concept | AKS Equivalent |
|---|---|
RKE cluster.yml | AKS cluster configuration (Bicep/Terraform/CLI) |
RKE2 config.yaml | AKS node pool configuration |
| K3s single-binary deployment | AKS managed control plane |
| RKE etcd snapshots / management | AKS managed etcd (automatic backups) |
| RKE network plugin selection (Canal, Calico, Flannel) | Azure CNI or Cilium |
| RKE ingress controller (NGINX by default) | AKS NGINX ingress add-on or AGIC |
| Rancher Concept | AKS Equivalent |
|---|---|
| Rancher Projects (namespace grouping) | AKS namespace-based isolation with RBAC |
| Project resource quotas | Kubernetes ResourceQuota per namespace |
| Project network isolation | Kubernetes NetworkPolicy per namespace |
| Rancher Global Roles | Azure RBAC + Kubernetes ClusterRoles |
| Rancher Cluster Roles | AKS cluster-scoped Kubernetes RBAC |
| Rancher Project Roles | Namespace-scoped Kubernetes RoleBindings |
| Rancher authentication providers (AD, LDAP, SAML) | Microsoft Entra ID integration with AKS |
| Rancher Concept | AKS Equivalent |
|---|---|
Longhorn (driver.longhorn.io) | AKS managed-csi (disk.csi.azure.com) |
| Longhorn recurring snapshots | Azure Disk snapshots / Azure Backup |
| Longhorn replicas across nodes | Azure ZRS managed disks |
| Longhorn backup to S3 | Azure Backup for AKS |
cattle.io and management.cattle.io CRDs and their instances must be removed. They have no AKS equivalent and will fail to apply.cattle-system, cattle-fleet-system, cattle-fleet-local-system, cattle-impersonation-system, and cattle-global-data namespaces.helm install or Flux HelmRelease.The following patterns in source manifests indicate Rancher/RKE/K3s origin:
cattle.io in any API groupmanagement.cattle.io resourcesfleet.cattle.io resourcescattle-system namespace referencesdriver.longhorn.io StorageClass provisionerk3s.io annotations or labelstraefik.containo.us)local-path StorageClass provisioner