The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio

Rancher is a beast of a codebase. Let's investigate if the new 2025 generation of GitHub Autonomous Coding Agents and Copilot Workspaces can actually tame it.

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The Plan

Create a sandbox GitHub Organization, clone in key Rancher repositories, and let the AI loose to see if it can handle real-world enterprise OSS maintenance - or if it just hallucinates new breeds of Kubernetes resources!

Specifically, throw "Agentic Coders" some typical tasks in a complex, long-lived open-source project, such as:

❥ The Grunt Work: generate missing GoDocs, unit tests, and refactorings. Rebase PRs.

❥ The Complex Stuff: fix actual (historical) bugs and feature requests to see if they can traverse the complexity without (too much) human hand-holding.

❥ Hunting Down Gaps: find areas lacking in docs, areas of improvement in code, dependency bumps, and so on.

If time allows, also experiment with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give agents context on our specific build pipelines and CI/CD logs.

Why?

We know AI can write "Hello World." and also moderately complex programs from a green field. But can it rebase a 3-month-old PR with conflicts in rancher/rancher? I want to find the breaking point of current AI agents to determine if and how they can help us to reduce our technical debt, work faster and better. At the same time, find out about pitfalls and shortcomings.

The CONCLUSION!!!

A State of the Union document was compiled to summarize lessons learned this week. For more gory details, just read on the diary below!

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Multi-agent AI assistant for Linux troubleshooting by doreilly

Description

Explore multi-agent architecture as a way to avoid MCP context rot.

Having one agent with many tools bloats the context with low-level details about tool descriptions, parameter schemas etc which hurts LLM performance. Instead have many specialised agents, each with just the tools it needs for its role. A top level supervisor agent takes the user prompt and delegates to appropriate sub-agents.

Goals

Create an AI assistant with some sub-agents that are specialists at troubleshooting Linux subsystems, e.g. systemd, selinux, firewalld etc. The agents can get information from the system by implementing their own tools with simple function calls, or use tools from MCP servers, e.g. a systemd-agent can use tools from systemd-mcp.

Example prompts/responses:

user$ the system seems slow
assistant$ process foo with pid 12345 is using 1000% cpu ...

user$ I can't connect to the apache webserver
assistant$ the firewall is blocking http ... you can open the port with firewall-cmd --add-port ...

Resources

Language Python. The Python ADK is more mature than Golang.

https://google.github.io/adk-docs/

https://github.com/djoreilly/linux-helper

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Kubernetes-Based ML Lifecycle Automation by lmiranda

Description

This project aims to build a complete end-to-end Machine Learning pipeline running entirely on Kubernetes, using Go, and containerized ML components.

The pipeline will automate the lifecycle of a machine learning model, including:

• Data ingestion/collection
• Model training as a Kubernetes Job
• Model artifact storage in an S3-compatible registry (e.g. Minio)
• A Go-based deployment controller that automatically deploys new model versions to Kubernetes using Rancher
• A lightweight inference service that loads and serves the latest model
• Monitoring of model performance and service health through Prometheus/Grafana

The outcome is a working prototype of an MLOps workflow that demonstrates how AI workloads can be trained, versioned, deployed, and monitored using the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Goals

By the end of Hack Week, the project should:

1. Produce a fully functional ML pipeline running on Kubernetes with:

   • Data collection job
   • Training job container
   • Storage and versioning of trained models
   • Automated deployment of new model versions
   • Model inference API service
   • Basic monitoring dashboards

2. Showcase a Go-based deployment automation component, which scans the model registry and automatically generates & applies Kubernetes manifests for new model versions.

3. Enable continuous improvement by making the system modular and extensible (e.g., additional models, metrics, autoscaling, or drift detection can be added later).

4. Prepare a short demo explaining the end-to-end process and how new models flow through the system.

Resources

Project Repository

Updates

1. Training pipeline and datasets
2. Inference Service py

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MCP Server for SCC by digitaltomm

Description

Provide an MCP Server implementation for customers to access data on scc.suse.com via MCP protocol. The core benefit of this MCP interface is that it has direct (read) access to customer data in SCC, so the AI agent gets enhanced knowledge about individual customer data, like subscriptions, orders and registered systems.

Architecture

Goals

We want to demonstrate a proof of concept to connect to the SCC MCP server with any AI agent, for example gemini-cli or codex. Enabling the user to ask questions regarding their SCC inventory.

For this Hackweek, we target that users get proper responses to these example questions:

• Which of my currently active systems are running products that are out of support?
• Do I have ready to use registration codes for SLES?
• What are the latest 5 released patches for SLES 15 SP6? Output as a list with release date, patch name, affected package names and fixed CVEs.
• Which versions of kernel-default are available on SLES 15 SP6?

Technical Notes

Similar to the organization APIs, this can expose to customers data about their subscriptions, orders, systems and products. Authentication should be done by organization credentials, similar to what needs to be provided to RMT/MLM. Customers can connect to the SCC MCP server from their own MCP-compatible client and Large Language Model (LLM), so no third party is involved.

Milestones

[x] Basic MCP API setup
  MCP endpoints
  [x] Products / Repositories
  [x] Subscriptions / Orders 
  [x] Systems
  [x] Packages
[x] Document usage with Gemini CLI, Codex

Resources

• fast_mcp library for Rails
• MCP test client
• SCC branch

Gemini CLI setup:

~/.gemini/settings.json:

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Bugzilla goes AI - Phase 1 by nwalter

Description

This project, Bugzilla goes AI, aims to boost developer productivity by creating an autonomous AI bug agent during Hackweek. The primary goal is to reduce the time employees spend triaging bugs by integrating Ollama to summarize issues, recommend next steps, and push focused daily reports to a Web Interface.

Goals

To reduce employee time spent on Bugzilla by implementing an AI tool that triages and summarizes bug reports, providing actionable recommendations to the team via Web Interface.

Project Charter

Bugzilla goes AI Phase 1

Description

Project Achievements during Hackweek

In this file you can read about what we achieved during Hackweek.

Project Achievements

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Ansible to Salt integration by vizhestkov

Description

We already have initial integration of Ansible in Salt with the possibility to run playbooks from the salt-master on the salt-minion used as an Ansible Control node.

In this project I want to check if it possible to make Ansible working on the transport of Salt. Basically run playbooks with Ansible through existing established Salt (ZeroMQ) transport and not using ssh at all.

It could be a good solution for the end users to reuse Ansible playbooks or run Ansible modules they got used to with no effort of complex configuration with existing Salt (or Uyuni/SUSE Multi Linux Manager) infrastructure.

Goals

• [v] Prepare the testing environment with Salt and Ansible installed
• [v] Discover Ansible codebase to figure out possible ways of integration
• [v] Create Salt/Uyuni inventory module
• [v] Make basic modules to work with no using separate ssh connection, but reusing existing Salt connection
• [v] Test some most basic playbooks

Resources

GitHub page

Video of the demo

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Testing and adding GNU/Linux distributions on Uyuni by juliogonzalezgil

Join the Gitter channel! https://gitter.im/uyuni-project/hackweek

Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines. It also manages configuration, can run audits, build image containers, monitor and much more!

Currently there are a few distributions that are completely untested on Uyuni or SUSE Manager (AFAIK) or just not tested since a long time, and could be interesting knowing how hard would be working with them and, if possible, fix whatever is broken.

For newcomers, the easiest distributions are those based on DEB or RPM packages. Distributions with other package formats are doable, but will require adapting the Python and Java code to be able to sync and analyze such packages (and if salt does not support those packages, it will need changes as well). So if you want a distribution with other packages, make sure you are comfortable handling such changes.

No developer experience? No worries! We had non-developers contributors in the past, and we are ready to help as long as you are willing to learn. If you don't want to code at all, you can also help us preparing the documentation after someone else has the initial code ready, or you could also help with testing :-)

The idea is testing Salt (including bootstrapping with bootstrap script) and Salt-ssh clients

To consider that a distribution has basic support, we should cover at least (points 3-6 are to be tested for both salt minions and salt ssh minions):

1. Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
2. Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap scritp, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
3. Package management (install, remove, update...)
4. Patching
5. Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
6. Salt remote commands
7. Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
8. Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
9. Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)
10. Bonus point: testsuite enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/tree/master/testsuite)

If something is breaking: we can try to fix it, but the main idea is research how supported it is right now. Beyond that it's up to each project member how much to hack :-)

• If you don't have knowledge about some of the steps: ask the team
• If you still don't know what to do: switch to another distribution and keep testing.

This card is for EVERYONE, not just developers. Seriously! We had people from other teams helping that were not developers, and added support for Debian and new SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap versions :-)

In progress/done for Hack Week 25

Guide

We started writin a Guide: Adding a new client GNU Linux distribution to Uyuni at https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/wiki/Guide:-Adding-a-new-client-GNU-Linux-distribution-to-Uyuni, to make things easier for everyone, specially those not too familiar wht Uyuni or not technical.

openSUSE Leap 16.0

The distribution will all love!

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Roadmap#DRAFTScheduleforLeap16.0

Curent Status We started last year, it's complete now for Hack Week 25! :-D

• [W] Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file) NOTE: Done, client tools for SLMicro6 are using as those for SLE16.0/openSUSE Leap 16.0 are not available yet
• [W] Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap scritp, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
• [W] Package management (install, remove, update...). Works, even reboot requirement detection

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mgr-ansible-ssh - Intelligent, Lightweight CLI for Distributed Remote Execution by deve5h

Description

By the end of Hack Week, the target will be to deliver a minimal functional version 1 (MVP) of a custom command-line tool named mgr-ansible-ssh (a unified wrapper for BOTH ad-hoc shell & playbooks) that allows operators to:

1. Execute arbitrary shell commands on thousand of remote machines simultaneously using Ansible Runner with artifacts saved locally.
2. Pass runtime options such as inventory file, remote command string/ playbook execution, parallel forks, limits, dry-run mode, or no-std-ansible-output.
3. Leverage existing SSH trust relationships without additional setup.
4. Provide a clean, intuitive CLI interface with --help for ease of use. It should provide consistent UX & CI-friendly interface.
5. Establish a foundation that can later be extended with advanced features such as logging, grouping, interactive shell mode, safe-command checks, and parallel execution tuning.

The MVP should enable day-to-day operations to efficiently target thousands of machines with a single, consistent interface.

Goals

Primary Goals (MVP):

Build a functional CLI tool (mgr-ansible-ssh) capable of executing shell commands on multiple remote hosts using Ansible Runner. Test the tool across a large distributed environment (1000+ machines) to validate its performance and reliability.

Looking forward to significantly reducing the zypper deployment time across all 351 RMT VM servers in our MLM cluster by eliminating the dependency on the taskomatic service, bringing execution down to a fraction of the current duration. The tool should also support multiple runtime flags, such as:

mgr-ansible-ssh: Remote command execution wrapper using Ansible Runner

Usage: mgr-ansible-ssh [--help] [--version] [--inventory INVENTORY]
                   [--run RUN] [--playbook PLAYBOOK] [--limit LIMIT]
                   [--forks FORKS] [--dry-run] [--no-ansible-output]

Required Arguments
--inventory, -i      Path to Ansible inventory file to use

Any One of the Arguments Is Required
--run, -r            Execute the specified shell command on target hosts
--playbook, -p       Execute the specified Ansible playbook on target hosts

Optional Arguments
--help, -h           Show the help message and exit
--version, -v        Show the version and exit
--limit, -l          Limit execution to specific hosts or groups
--forks, -f          Number of parallel Ansible forks
--dry-run            Run in Ansible check mode (requires -p or --playbook)
--no-ansible-output  Suppress Ansible stdout output

Secondary/Stretched Goals (if time permits):

1. Add pretty output formatting (success/failure summary per host).
2. Implement basic logging of executed commands and results.
3. Introduce safety checks for risky commands (shutdown, rm -rf, etc.).
4. Package the tool so it can be installed with pip or stored internally.

Resources

Collaboration is welcome from anyone interested in CLI tooling, automation, or distributed systems. Skills that would be particularly valuable include:

1. Python especially around CLI dev (argparse, click, rich)

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Flaky Tests AI Finder for Uyuni and MLM Test Suites by oscar-barrios

Description

Our current Grafana dashboards provide a great overview of test suite health, including a panel for "Top failed tests." However, identifying which of these failures are due to legitimate bugs versus intermittent "flaky tests" is a manual, time-consuming process. These flaky tests erode trust in our test suites and slow down development.

This project aims to build a simple but powerful Python script that automates flaky test detection. The script will directly query our Prometheus instance for the historical data of each failed test, using the jenkins_build_test_case_failure_age metric. It will then format this data and send it to the Gemini API with a carefully crafted prompt, asking it to identify which tests show a flaky pattern.

The final output will be a clean JSON list of the most probable flaky tests, which can then be used to populate a new "Top Flaky Tests" panel in our existing Grafana test suite dashboard.

Goals

By the end of Hack Week, we aim to have a single, working Python script that:

1. Connects to Prometheus and executes a query to fetch detailed test failure history.
2. Processes the raw data into a format suitable for the Gemini API.
3. Successfully calls the Gemini API with the data and a clear prompt.
4. Parses the AI's response to extract a simple list of flaky tests.
5. Saves the list to a JSON file that can be displayed in Grafana.
6. New panel in our Dashboard listing the Flaky tests

Resources

• Jenkins Prometheus Exporter: https://github.com/uyuni-project/jenkins-exporter/
• Data Source: Our internal Prometheus server.
• Key Metric: jenkins_build_test_case_failure_age{jobname, buildid, suite, case, status, failedsince}.
• Existing Query for Reference: count by (suite) (max_over_time(jenkins_build_test_case_failure_age{status=~"FAILED|REGRESSION", jobname="$jobname"}[$__range])).
• AI Model: The Google Gemini API.
• Example about how to interact with Gemini API: https://github.com/srbarrios/FailTale/
• Visualization: Our internal Grafana Dashboard.
• Internal IaC: https://gitlab.suse.de/galaxy/infrastructure/-/tree/master/srv/salt/monitoring

Outcome

• Jenkins Flaky Test Detector: https://github.com/srbarrios/jenkins-flaky-tests-detector and its container
• IaC on MLM Team: https://gitlab.suse.de/galaxy/infrastructure/-/tree/master/srv/salt/monitoring/jenkinsflakytestsdetector?reftype=heads, https://gitlab.suse.de/galaxy/infrastructure/-/blob/master/srv/salt/monitoring/grafana/dashboards/flaky-tests.json?ref_type=heads, and others.
• Grafana Dashboard: https://grafana.mgr.suse.de/d/flaky-tests/flaky-tests-detection @ @ text

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Set Up an Ephemeral Uyuni Instance by mbussolotto

Description

To test, check, and verify the latest changes in the master branch, we want to easily set up an ephemeral environment.

Goals

• Create an ephemeral environment manually

• Create an ephemeral environment automatically

  Resources

• https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni

• https://www.uyuni-project.org/uyuni-docs/en/uyuni/index.html

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