github.com/rancher/rke2/releases#… v1.33.13-rke2r3 is a prime-only release? What does that mean?

Only available to suse customers. https://www.suse.com/products/rancher/

Hm... I upgraded to that version a few minutes ago. No subscription, no authentication, it's freely available. So what?

The content is not available from github/docker hub, only from prime registry and build system. While you may be able to pull/download from those anonymously at the moment, that will not always be the case.

If you guys want to enforce that, then the "right date" was yesterday. It's going to be hard to change things later. Just saying... the same thing applies to Rancher btw.

I’m just an engineer, not a product manager. There has been a long road towards having all the plumbing in place to require auth for the rancher prime registry and prime artifacts download site in a way that can be integrated into Rancher. If you’re not paying for Prime, you shouldn’t be using the Prime artifacts. Stick with community.

I'm not paying for prime, but I'm working for a Suse partner, so I have some cards in the game too.

It's going to change soon, get in touch with your Partner Manager at SUSE to be explained how partners should operate with SUSE products

I don't hear this the first time. I hope Suse will approach us very soon instead if this is true. Because we have to inform our customers, adjust architectures etc.. And what do you mean with "operate with Suse products"? We use NFR licenses if applicable and follow rules and agreements...

SUSE partners and customers will be notified well before any change to Rancher Prime download sties are made, with instructions on a smooth transition. We definitely don't want to break any customer deployments.

Hi Armin, thanks for flagging this! I also raised this internally and here's what we can officially say so far - v1.33.13+rke2r3 was published to the Rancher Prime registry as an out-of-band maintenance release to resolve a critical etcd bootstrap loop issue in Kubernetes v1.33.    Because upstream Kubernetes v1.33 reached End-of-Life, public community builds for this branch have ceased. However, enterprise production environments often require longer operational maintenance windows than standard upstream lifecycles provide. To address this, a targeted backport was made available as a Prime-only release through Extended Lifecycle Support. Community users are encouraged to upgrade to supported minor versions (v1.34 or newer) to consume the appropriate fix within standard community release channels.