Rancher is designed (as best as I can tell) to own and run a kubernetes cluster. Rancher does provide a configuration so that kubectl can interact w/ the kubernetes cluster. Rancher seems like a nice tool. But as far as I can tell, there is no way to connect to an existing kubernetes cluster. Is there any way to do this?
I got this answer on the rancher forums
There is not, most of the value we can add at the moment is around configuring, managing, and controlling access to the installation we setup.
https://forums.rancher.com/t/rancher-connect-to-kubernetes-instead-of-start-kubernetes/3209
If you are looking for a service that can connect to an existing k8s cluster(s) then try Containership. You can use Kubectl and/or the Containership UI to manage you workloads, config maps, etc on multiple clusters.
Hope this helps!