In my previous post, I showed how to provision a Kubernetes node in NixOS maintaining compatibility with RKE1 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine v1), but switching to the Kubernetes nixpkg. In this post, I’m going to show how to take an Ubuntu worker and replace it with a NixOS based worker without rebuilding the cluster.
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Replatform RKE1 to Nix
This article is part of the Replatform RKE1 to Nix series.
RKE1 (Rancher Kubernetes Engine 1) was Rancher’s first way of automatically deploying Kubernetes to a cluster. Think of it like minikube or on-prem EKS or K3s. Three years ago, it was marked as end of life (EoL) with the last release being July 2025. They have no migration guide and their strategy is just rebuild the cluster. I have 3 nodes a bunch of services running in Kubernetes. I don’t want to take everything down and rebuild it all. Let’s rebuild it while the plane is in the air.