Hi all, we are going to migrate our platform to Rancher using Rancher Lunched AKS clusters and we have a few concerns that we would like to address: • When is Rancher 2.7.1 going to be released? The Rancher support matrix for 2.7.1 shows k8s v1.24.6 as the highest supported version and Azure will drop AKS v1.24 in a few months... Should this be a concern for us? What could happen if we create our cluster with Rancher for an unsupported K8s version? 1.25 for example. • If we move to AKS imported clusters, in case we add node pools, and upgrade the cluster, will those changes be reflected in the Rancher Platform? • If we face some issues by running an unsupported K8s version on Rancher Launched K8s clusters, is it possible to remove it from Rancher, do stuff we need and then import it into the platform? • It looks like AKS is faster than Rancher regarding supported Kubernetes versions... We would like to know if Rancher will always be on track with AKS regarding the removal of K8s version support and new versions. • What are exactly the big differences between imported AKS and Rancher-launched AKS? What should we look at, and what issues can we face when using one or another? Thanks! 🙂

imported aks = azure controls the release cycle, etcd backups, etc 1.24 -> 1.25 is a massive jump because of the removal of PSPs (pod security policies) which rancher has historically been very reliant on, thats the primary reason they have been so slow to adopt 1.25 where previously they would be pretty on top of release schedules

Our customer already uses AKS and want to stay with AKS. And Rancher is for managing the multiple clusters that the customer now need to add. We use the main rancher cluster as central monitoring/logging/flux instance for deployments and global view on the downstream clusters. (dev/staging/prod)

my 2c, terraform spin up aks clusters, and then import them into rancher and let aks deal with all of the messy control-plane bits. Continue to use rancher the way you are, as a single pane and k8s gui layer.

At the moment we have Rancher launched AKS clusters. But we are thinking in maybe moving to imported AKS clusters. We use the terraform rancher2 provider to create the downstream clusters.

the rancher agent runs as a daemonset on all nodes in the cluster, so it would spin up on any new nodes you create

The support for k8s 1.25 will be added in Rancher v2.7.2 which is coming very soon 🙂

Does Rancher AKS Launched cluster support manual AKS k8S version upgrade ?

yes, you can upgrade it in Rancher by editing the cluster and select a newer version from the versions dropdown list in rancher UI.

I meant, manual AKS upgrade in Azure