Project Description
The Cluster API "infrastructure provider" for Harvester, also named CAPHV, makes it possible to use Harvester with Cluster API. This enables people and organisations to create Kubernetes clusters running on VMs created by Harvester using a declarative spec.
The project has been bootstrapped in HackWeek 23, and its code is available here.
Work done in HackWeek 2023
- Have a early working version of the provider available on Rancher Sandbox : *DONE *
- Demonstrated the created cluster can be imported using Rancher Turtles: DONE
- Stretch goal - demonstrate using the new provider with CAPRKE2: DONE and the templates are available on the repo
DONE in HackWeek 24:
- Add more Unit Tests
- Improve Status Conditions for some phases
- Add cloud provider config generation
- Testing with Harvester v1.3.2
- Template improvements
- Issues creation
DONE in 2025 (out of Hackweek)
- Support of ClusterClass
- Add to
clusterctlcommunity providers, you can add it directly withclusterctl - Testing on newer versions of Harvester v1.4.X and v1.5.X
- Support for
clusterctl generate cluster ... - Improve Status Conditions to reflect current state of Infrastructure
- Improve CI (some bugs for release creation)
Goals for HackWeek 2025
- FIRST and FOREMOST, any topic is important to you
- Add e2e testing
- Certify the provider for Rancher Turtles
- Add Machine pool labeling
- Add PCI-e passthrough capabilities.
- Other improvement suggestions are welcome!
Thanks to @isim and Dominic Giebert for their contributions!
Resources
Looking for help from anyone interested in Cluster API (CAPI) or who wants to learn more about Harvester.
This will be an infrastructure provider for Cluster API. Some background reading for the CAPI aspect:
Looking for hackers with the skills:
clusterapi capi harvester go provisioning rancher turtles kubernetes
This project is part of:
Hack Week 23 Hack Week 24 Hack Week 25
Activity
Comments
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about 2 years ago by alex.arnoldy | Reply
I have a reasonable level of experience with Harvester, and limited experience with CAPI. Looking forward to learning more, and hopefully adding some value!
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about 1 year ago by mohamed.belgaied | Reply
I am planning on continuing this project for Hackweek 24 (November), is anyone motivated?
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about 1 year ago by mohamed.belgaied | Reply
Hi All, To all those who still have interest in contributing or giving feedback, please let me know and we can organize ourselves. @dmurga @furkatgofurov @alex.arnoldy @isim @rcase
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about 2 months ago by bkampen | Reply
Hi @rcase I want to join, but I don't see a join button.
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about 2 months ago by mohamed.belgaied | Reply
You can join the project by clicking the green button
join projecton the right of the project name.
-
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- Deliver an easy-to-install, read-only component (single YAML or small Helm chart) that Rancher users can deploy to their management cluster and inspect via
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Resources
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- Rancher API Go types for
provisioning.cattle.io/v1andmanagement.cattle.io/v3(from therancher/rancherrepository or published Go packages). - Existing Rancher architecture docs and internal notes about cluster provisioning, cluster agents, and node agents.
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Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI. Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.
Project Description
Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as:
harvester vm create my-vm --count 5
to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.
Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.
Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli
Done in previous Hackweeks
- Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
- Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE
Goal for this Hackweek
The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.
Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it
Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues
Resources
The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact).
Welcome contributions are:
- Testing it and creating issues
- Documentation
- Go code improvement
What you might learn
Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:
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- Harvester as a SUSE Product
- Go programming language
- Kubernetes API
- Kubevirt API objects (Manipulating VMs and VM Configuration in Kubernetes using Kubevirt)
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Description
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Goals
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Example:
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Technical Overview
- The AI agent should expose a new ws/autocomplete endpoint to proxy autocomplete messages to the LLM.
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The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio
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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!
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❥ 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 Outputs
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❥ Honest, Daily Updates With All the Gory Details
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Description
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Goals
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Provisioning,WaitingForClusterAgent,Active,Updating,Error) derived fromprovisioning.cattle.io/v1 Clusterandmanagement.cattle.io/v3 Clusterstatus and conditions. - Maintain a phase history for each cluster, allowing operators to see how its state evolved over time since the visualizer was installed.
- Attach a recommended action to the current phase using a small ruleset based on common Rancher failure modes (for example, cluster agent not connected, cluster still stabilizing after an upgrade, or generic error states), to improve the day-to-day debugging experience.
- Deliver an easy-to-install, read-only component (single YAML or small Helm chart) that Rancher users can deploy to their management cluster and inspect via
kubectl get/describe, without UI changes or direct access to downstream clusters. - Use idiomatic Go, wrangler, and Rancher APIs.
Resources
- Rancher Manager documentation on RKE2 and K3s cluster configuration and provisioning flows.
- Rancher API Go types for
provisioning.cattle.io/v1andmanagement.cattle.io/v3(from therancher/rancherrepository or published Go packages). - Existing Rancher architecture docs and internal notes about cluster provisioning, cluster agents, and node agents.
- A local Rancher management cluster (k3s or RKE2) with a few test downstream clusters to validate phase detection, history tracking, and recommendations.
Rancher/k8s Trouble-Maker by tonyhansen
Project Description
When studying for my RHCSA, I found trouble-maker, which is a program that breaks a Linux OS and requires you to fix it. I want to create something similar for Rancher/k8s that can allow for troubleshooting an unknown environment.
Goals for Hackweek 25
- Update to modern Rancher and verify that existing tests still work
- Change testing logic to populate secrets instead of requiring a secondary script
- Add new tests
Goals for Hackweek 24 (Complete)
- Create a basic framework for creating Rancher/k8s cluster lab environments as needed for the Break/Fix
- Create at least 5 modules that can be applied to the cluster and require troubleshooting
Resources
- https://github.com/celidon/rancher-troublemaker
- https://github.com/rancher/terraform-provider-rancher2
- https://github.com/rancher/tf-rancher-up
- https://github.com/rancher/quickstart
Preparing KubeVirtBMC for project transfer to the KubeVirt organization by zchang
Description
KubeVirtBMC is preparing to transfer the project to the KubeVirt organization. One requirement is to enhance the modeling design's security. The current v1alpha1 API (the VirtualMachineBMC CRD) was designed during the proof-of-concept stage. It's immature and inherently insecure due to its cross-namespace object references, exposing security concerns from an RBAC perspective.
The other long-awaited feature is the ability to mount virtual media so that virtual machines can boot from remote ISO images.
Goals
- Deliver the v1beta1 API and its corresponding controller implementation
- Enable the Redfish virtual media mount function for KubeVirt virtual machines
Resources
- The KubeVirtBMC repo: https://github.com/starbops/kubevirtbmc
- The new v1beta1 API: https://github.com/starbops/kubevirtbmc/issues/83
- Redfish virtual media mount: https://github.com/starbops/kubevirtbmc/issues/44
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:
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
Showcase a Go-based deployment automation component, which scans the model registry and automatically generates & applies Kubernetes manifests for new model versions.
Enable continuous improvement by making the system modular and extensible (e.g., additional models, metrics, autoscaling, or drift detection can be added later).
Prepare a short demo explaining the end-to-end process and how new models flow through the system.
Resources
OpenPlatform Self-Service Portal by tmuntan1
Description
In SUSE IT, we developed an internal developer platform for our engineers using SUSE technologies such as RKE2, SUSE Virtualization, and Rancher. While it works well for our existing users, the onboarding process could be better.
To improve our customer experience, I would like to build a self-service portal to make it easy for people to accomplish common actions. To get started, I would have the portal create Jira SD tickets for our customers to have better information in our tickets, but eventually I want to add automation to reduce our workload.
Goals
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Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher by ademicev0
Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher

Description
The Problem
Running LLMs can get expensive and complex pretty quickly.
Today there are typically two choices:
- Use cloud APIs like OpenAI or Anthropic. Easy to start with, but costs add up at scale.
- Self-host everything - set up Kubernetes, figure out GPU scheduling, handle scaling, manage model serving... it's a lot of work.
What if there was a middle ground?
What if infrastructure scaled itself instead of making you scale it?
Can we use existing Rancher capabilities like CAPI, autoscaling, and GitOps to make this simpler instead of building everything from scratch?
Project Repository: github.com/alexander-demicev/llmserverless
What This Project Does
A key feature is hybrid deployment: requests can be routed based on complexity or privacy needs. Simple or low-sensitivity queries can use public APIs (like OpenAI), while complex or private requests are handled in-house on local infrastructure. This flexibility allows balancing cost, privacy, and performance - using cloud for routine tasks and on-premises resources for sensitive or demanding workloads.
A complete, self-scaling LLM infrastructure that:
- Scales to zero when idle (no idle costs)
- Scales up automatically when requests come in
- Adds more nodes when needed, removes them when demand drops
- Runs on any infrastructure - laptop, bare metal, or cloud
Think of it as "serverless for LLMs" - focus on building, the infrastructure handles itself.
How It Works
A combination of open source tools working together:
Flow:
- Users interact with OpenWebUI (chat interface)
- Requests go to LiteLLM Gateway
- LiteLLM routes requests to:
- Ollama (Knative) for local model inference (auto-scales pods)
- Or cloud APIs for fallback
Rancher/k8s Trouble-Maker by tonyhansen
Project Description
When studying for my RHCSA, I found trouble-maker, which is a program that breaks a Linux OS and requires you to fix it. I want to create something similar for Rancher/k8s that can allow for troubleshooting an unknown environment.
Goals for Hackweek 25
- Update to modern Rancher and verify that existing tests still work
- Change testing logic to populate secrets instead of requiring a secondary script
- Add new tests
Goals for Hackweek 24 (Complete)
- Create a basic framework for creating Rancher/k8s cluster lab environments as needed for the Break/Fix
- Create at least 5 modules that can be applied to the cluster and require troubleshooting
Resources
- https://github.com/celidon/rancher-troublemaker
- https://github.com/rancher/terraform-provider-rancher2
- https://github.com/rancher/tf-rancher-up
- https://github.com/rancher/quickstart
