Warning
Upstream ingress-nginx Retirement & Transition to Traefik
Because ingress-nginx was retired upstream as of March 2026, Traefik is now the default for new clusters starting in v1.36 (existing clusters will keep their current ingress upon upgrade to avoid breakage). This transition brings the following structural changes:
- Airgapped Environments: The
rke2-images-coretarball now contains Traefik images instead ofingress-nginx. The standalonerke2-images-traefiktarball has been removed. Users who must continue usingingress-nginxwill now need to manually provide therke2-images-ingress-nginxtarball. - Future Removal: The
ingress-nginxchart will not receive any additional updates and will be completely removed in v1.37 for community users. - Prime Customers: Please refer to the official product documentation for specific Prime considerations.
This release updates Kubernetes to v1.36.2.
Important Note
If your server (control-plane) nodes were not started with the --token CLI flag or config file key, a randomized token was generated during initial cluster startup. This key is used both for joining new nodes to the cluster, and for encrypting cluster bootstrap data within the datastore. Ensure that you retain a copy of this token, as is required when restoring from backup.
You may retrieve the token value from any server already joined to the cluster:
cat /var/lib/rancher/rke2/server/tokenChanges since v1.36.1+rke2r2:
- 1.36 Bump ecm distro 0.72.0 (#10508)
- Set startup probes for etcd (#10481)
- Bump K3s/containerd/etcd/kine/spegel/klipper-helm (#10511)
- Set bootstrap to false for rke2-multus (#10517)
- Bump Traefik image and chart (#10556)
- Update CoreDNS chart 1.46.0 and Update Kubernetes Metrics Server chart 3.13.1 (#10536)
- CNI bumps for the 2026-06 Release Cycle (#10544)
- Bump snapshot-controller (#10573)
- Bump prime ingress nginx chart and image to v1.15.1 (#10571)
- Bump BCI images for CVE reasons (#10581)
- Update Canal chart with crd fix (#10598)
- Bump k3s to remove golang version checks (#10604)
- Update to coredns chart 1.46.002 (#10593)
- Update to v1.36.2 and Go v1.26.4 (#10619)
- Bump klipper-helm for CVE reasons (#10624)
- Fix missing arm64 checksum (#10632)
- Bump containerd with the fix for []byte (#10638)
- Bump containerd to v2.3.2 (#10653)
- Bump cri-api and containerd for upstream env string fix (#10673)
Charts Versions
| Component | Version |
|---|---|
| rke2-cilium | 1.19.402 |
| rke2-canal | v3.32.0-build2026060401 |
| rke2-calico | v3.32.003 |
| rke2-calico-crd | v3.32.003 |
| rke2-coredns | 1.46.002 |
| rke2-ingress-nginx | 4.15.101 |
| rke2-metrics-server | 3.13.100 |
| rancher-vsphere-csi | 3.7.0-rancher100 |
| rancher-vsphere-cpi | 1.14.000 |
| harvester-cloud-provider | 0.2.1100 |
| harvester-csi-driver | 0.1.2800 |
| rke2-snapshot-controller | 4.2.006 |
| rke2-snapshot-controller-crd | 4.2.006 |
| rke2-traefik | 40.1.003 |
| rke2-traefik-crd | 40.1.003 |
Packaged Component Versions
| Component | Version |
|---|---|
| Kubernetes | v1.36.2 |
| Etcd | v3.6.12-k3s1 |
| Containerd | v2.3.2-k3s2 |
| Runc | v1.4.2 |
| Metrics-server | v0.8.1 |
| CoreDNS | v1.14.4 |
| Ingress-Nginx | v1.14.5-hardened2 |
| Helm-controller | v0.17.1 |
| Traefik | v3.7.4 |
Available CNIs
| Component | Version | FIPS Compliant |
|---|---|---|
| Canal (Default) | Flannel v0.28.5 Calico v3.32.0 | Yes |
| Calico | v3.32.0 | No |
| Cilium | v1.19.4 | No |
| Multus | v4.2.4 | No |
Helpful Links
As always, we welcome and appreciate feedback from our community of users. Please feel free to:
- Open issues here
- Join our Slack channel
- Check out our documentation for guidance on how to get started.