looks like rancher is not interested in supporting rke users

You mean, in favour of rke2? I am also curious to know if i should proceed with rke1 (rke) or rke2 for my new clusters. What is the long term community support plan for rke1, if any?

We are supporting RKE and RKE2 in parallel for the foreseeable future. nothing is happening to RKE so I dont understand why there is so much confusion around the future of it.... Also, I dont fully understand what you mean by "community support"? there really isn't such a thing for any of SUSEs products. SUSE is a company that makes money from selling support contracts - this is not a secret. The replies from people on this channel or reddit or whatever else are doing this in our free time hence no SLA or support structure. We're just trying our best to work on a project we all really like. We take a lot of inspiration from the ideas put out by the community as well as enjoy community involvement but we don't (and have never) provide support to the community in any capacity outside of best effort/in our free time.

Thanks for clearing doubt about support. Yes. I am aware about SUSE support, which is giving me confidence to setup RKE or RKE2. My doubt was around long term plan of RKE including future development and updates, so that we don't have to plan migration after 6 or 12 months of new cluster setup. Since it is no where documented (or may be I am unable to find), it is making us all confusing to choose RKE or RKE2 when we search on multiple sources. I totally respect all efforts you guys are putting in your best effort time. 🙂

K8s 1.23 is eol in ~6mo. Without an upgrade path to 1.24, why would rke1 continue to be maintained past that point?

Yea the release is taking a bit longer but we have our own docker shim (as I understand, disclaimer Im not a dev) in RKE we've had it included for quite some time: https://www.suse.com/support/kb/doc/?id=000020538

@bulky-sunset-52084 That is great news. I missed the memo on that. Has there been a public announcement? I have been in a panic planning to migrate off of rke1

I don't know of an announcement more public than that. but if it helps take a look at this release candidate (please don't use until a full release): https://github.com/rancher/rke/releases/tag/v1.3.13-rc5 This means 1.24 will cut on rke 1.3.13 (likely)

Rke1 supports 1.24. Which is why I thought 1.23 was the end for rke1. I suspect a lot of users are thinking the same thing.

Yea I see that it's a bit of a timing thing... We probably have some areas of improvement in communication - idk tho that's above my pay grade :p Hopefully this will help out some tho.

Yes, this takes rke1 retirement out of panic mode for me. Thank you very much.