Rancher Product Lifecycle Advisory: Review these 2019 EOM dates to plan for any upgrades

Dear Rancher user,

We have been sharing important Rancher product lifecycle dates on our Support and Maintenance Terms of Service page.

To help you plan for any necessary upgrades for your deployments, we would like to bring to your attention some Rancher product versions that are approaching (or have reached) their End of Maintenance (EOM) milestones this year.  These are:

EOM Dates in 2019

What does the above mean?

After a product release reaches its EOM date, no further code-level maintenance will be provided, except for critical security-related fixes.  Product will continue to be supported in a limited manner until it reaches End of Life (EOL), in the form of:

• General troubleshooting of a specific issue to isolate potential causes
• Upgrade recommendation to an existing newer version of product
• Issue resolution limited to applying configuration changes and/or an upgrade recommendation to an existing newer version of product

For Rancher v1.6 users

There has been several bug fixes, security-related fixes, performance improvements and some feature enhancements to Rancher v1.6 in the last 12-18 months.  A select list of these enhancements can be viewed here (requires login to Rancher Support Portal).  Rancher Labs strongly recommends upgrading your deployment to a 2019 release such as v1.6.28 to benefit from these enhancements, as well as plan for your deployment's future beyond the Rancher v1.6 EOM date of December 31, 2019. 

Note:

• Rancher v1.x does not have any planned development beyond 2019 and has a published EOL date of June 30, 2020.  
• To be eligible for limited support during the EOM to EOL phase, deployments need to be on Rancher v1.6.28 or above.
• There is no direct upgrade path from Rancher v1.6 to v2.x.  Please visit this page, for migrating from v1.6 to v2.x.

If you are a RancherOS user, please visit our Support and Maintenance Terms of Service page for information on EOM dates.

If there are any questions, simply submit a request via this portal referencing this article and we will track and respond to your question as a Support Ticket.

Thanks

Rancher Support Team