[Rancher] What is the difference between "stable" and "latest" release tags?

Rancher latest releases are available in the rancher-latest helm chart repo and on Github before being promoted to stable and added to the SUSE Prime Registry and rancher-stable helm chart repo. Customers should use only the SUSE Prime Registry or rancher-stable helm chart repo for production. Latest releases will only be supported as best effort and will not have bug fixes.

This allows the community to try out the new release in their test environments for a period of two weeks and provide feedback so we can assess the stability of the release. Once the release is determined to be stable, it will be released to the SUSE Prime Registry and to the rancher-stable helm chart repo. As a result, Prime customers using the trusted registry will receive only stable, community-tested releases.

Please note that these latest tagged releases are not meant for production use cases. Rancher customers are advised to use the stable repos for production. Visit the Rancher docs for more information on latest vs stable Rancher versions. This information can also be found in the Github README.

Releases that have not been deemed stable at the two week mark will remain in the public repo but will not be released to the stable repos. These latest-only releases are not supported and will never reach a stable release status. Instead, a new patch version will be released with a fix for the issue(s) that caused instability.

Rancher Support team will encourage customers running non-stable releases to upgrade as soon as possible. Also, a support matrix will be available only for stable releases.

Rancher Support FAQs