@creamy-pencil-82913, I have logged https://github.com/rancher/rke2/issues/3462 Once I faced the error, thought of trying out crictl command execution on nodes like.

root@server:/home/ubuntu# crictl pull --creds "AWS:eyJwYXlsb2FkIjoieXRSVW5JMzkwRlVneitXNnpPNnJGOGRqYU9yZ0tRbEFIdkF0aGprMjlNTU1JWWdQd095QlJsQ01FUmRCWFVjZlZNNkEyRTdYS3ByeVRwRjhPNWlneStEdEtmcXdrR2tkMnlwM3RNUnFNNG8zOW1xdUsrSlVOemVWWDFUbGEwR1RqdjkyMmtXMWNsVUZuVnJxOEUzM3VubG9wdm5HbVp0a3o2YVdVSGNzM20reDEvbTl1K2dLZTk1ZnhaTnIrdU43SmRyNlBod0Z1TXBMUnNxUzZoZC9rYy9xMmwxbDJRNXk0Nm9scDNtNG9uc29pdjRid1JBMVpIaEdvMDhSS1lac" <http://1234.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/mlflow-run:latest|1234.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/mlflow-run:latest>

This ended up in error

WARN[0000] image connect using default endpoints: [unix:///var/run/dockershim.sock unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock unix:///run/crio/crio.sock]. As the default settings are now deprecated, you should set the endpoint instead.
ERRO[0002] connect endpoint 'unix:///var/run/dockershim.sock', make sure you are running as root and the endpoint has been started: context deadline exceeded
ERRO[0004] connect endpoint 'unix:///run/containerd/containerd.sock', make sure you are running as root and the endpoint has been started: context deadline exceeded
FATA[0006] connect: connect endpoint 'unix:///run/crio/crio.sock', make sure you are running as root and the endpoint has been started: context deadline exceeded

to overcome above error, I have added

/etc/crictl.yaml

file with below content.

runtime-endpoint: unix:///run/k3s/containerd/containerd.sock
image-endpoint: unix:///run/k3s/containerd/containerd.sock
timeout: 10

After creating above file, on pod creation images were pulled successfully from AWS ECR.