Recommendation against the use of --atomic flag for Rancher upgrades

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Environment

Rancher 2.x
Helm

Situation

Rancher upgrades using Helm

Resolution

Do not use of the --atomic flag for Rancher upgrades using helm

Cause

Hypothetically, if the Rancher portion of the upgrade succeeds and the new Rancher Pods start running and making configuration state changes to the Rancher custom resources but then the helm upgrade fails on another part of the chart for any reason, a helm rollback is automatically performed due to the `--atomic` flag.

Because Helm rollbacks are not supported for Rancher you may end up in a broken state, with partially upgraded Rancher state, but with the older Rancher version running.

For Rancher rollbacks in the case of a failed upgrade you should refer to the Rancher rollback documentation using the Rancher backup operator, or a cluster-level backup .

Additional Information

https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.6/en/installation/install-rancher-on-k8s/rollbacks/
https://rancher.com/docs/rke/latest/en/etcd-snapshots/restoring-from-backup/

Disclaimer

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