Announcing Rancher Prime 3.1: Empowering Platform Engineering for up to 5 years with LTS Core

We are thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of Rancher Prime 3.1 that extends enterprise support to market leading lengths. Much like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, which provides up to 13 years of support, Rancher Prime continually expands its enterprise support. 

Introducing: Long Term Support for up to two years of enterprise help for Rancher Prime –more than plenty, since updating Rancher Prime is so simple. And by popular demand, LTS Core introduces up to five years of support for K3s and RKE2, aligning with enterprises that prefer to stay on Kubernetes long-term. The new lifecycle for Rancher Prime ensures your infrastructure remains reliable in the long run. Additionally, Rancher Prime’s release cycle is now more closely aligned with upstream Kubernetes, so Rancher Prime versions will be released soon after new Kubernetes releases.

With recent additions, Rancher Prime is a more robust platform than ever. Alongside the new long-term enterprise support, Rancher Prime includes industry-leading compliance, a vetted open source catalog, zero trust container security, ready RBAC, and soon, observability to meet the diverse needs of today’s enterprises.

Enterprise Support for Years

Rancher Prime 3.1 introduces a structured lifecycle management approach designed to provide predictable and stable releases. The Long Term Support (LTS) model ensures that your Kubernetes environments are not only current but also secure and compliant.

• Full Support: Each version of Rancher Prime receives full support for the first six months.
• Maintenance Support: After the initial six months, the version enters an 12-month maintenance phase, where it continues to receive critical updates and patches.
• LTS: Odd minor versions of Rancher Prime are designated as LTS versions that can receive up to two years of combined full and maintenance support –also covering K3s and RKE2.
• LTS Core extends support for K3s and RKE2 from prior LTS, adding three years for up to five years total, ensuring long-term stability for your critical workloads.

Beyond the Long Term support, Rancher 3.1 regularly updates every four months  aligning closely with upstream Kubernetes, ensuring your infrastructure remains current and secure. For example, if the latest Kubernetes release is version 1.31 , K3s “n-1” released today is 1.30.

Platform Extensibility and Integration

Rancher Prime 3.1 enhances platform extensibility by integrating key tools and technologies that streamline operations and support advanced use cases.

• Rancher Prime Observability provides advanced observability, helping teams gain deeper insights into their Kubernetes environments.
• NeuVector Prime 5.4 strengthens container security with comprehensive threat detection and prevention features. Now, with real time compliance reports and deeper Rancher Prime integration. Learn more about the latest NeuVector Prime 5.4
• Harvester 1.3 delivers robust virtualization capabilities, enhancing the flexibility and efficiency of your infrastructure.

Why Choose Rancher Prime 3.1?

Rancher Prime 3.1 is designed to address the diverse needs of both DevOps and platform engineering teams, providing a comprehensive suite of tools that simplify the management of containerized workloads. Its robust lifecycle support, enhanced integration capabilities and focus on security and compliance make it an indispensable asset for modern enterprises looking to innovate quickly and securely.

Join us in embracing the future of enterprise container management with Rancher Prime 3.1. Get in touch for more insights into how Rancher Prime can transform your container management strategy.

Stay tuned for upcoming webinars and events where we will dive deeper into the new features and capabilities of Rancher Prime 3.1.

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