Integrate Backstage with Rancher Manager by nwmacd

Description

Backstage (backstage.io) is an open-source, CNCF project that allows you to create your own developer portal. There are many plugins for Backstage.

This could be a great compliment to Rancher Manager.

Goals

Learn and experiment with Backstage and look at how this could be integrated with Rancher Manager. Goal is to have some kind of integration completed in this Hack week.

Progress

Screen shot of home page at the end of Hackweek:

Day One

• Got Backstage running locally, understanding configuration with HTTPs.
• Got Backstage embedded in an IFRAME inside of Rancher
• Added content into the software catalog (see: https://backstage.io/docs/features/techdocs/getting-started/)
• Understood more about the entity model

Day Two

• Connected Backstage to the Rancher local cluster and configured the Kubernetes plugin.
• Created Rancher theme to make the light theme more consistent with Rancher

Days Three and Day Four

• Created two backend plugins for Backstage:

  1. Catalog Entity Provider - this imports users from Rancher into Backstage
  2. Auth Provider - uses the proxied sign-in pattern to check the Rancher session cookie, to user that to authenticate the user with Rancher and then log them into Backstage by connecting this to the imported User entity from the catalog entity provider plugin.

• With this in place, you can single-sign-on between Rancher and Backstage when it is deployed within Rancher. Note this is only when running locally for development at present

Day Five

• Start to build out a production deployment for all of the above
• Made some progress, but hit issues with the authentication and proxying when running proxied within Rancher, which needs further investigation

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Introducing "Bottles": A Proof of Concept for Multi-Version CRD Management in Kubernetes by aruiz

Description

As we delve deeper into the complexities of managing multiple CRD versions within a single Kubernetes cluster, I want to introduce "Bottles" - a proof of concept that aims to address these challenges.

Bottles propose a novel approach to isolating and deploying different CRD versions in a self-contained environment. This would allow for greater flexibility and efficiency in managing diverse workloads.

Goals

• Evaluate Feasibility: determine if this approach is technically viable, as well as identifying possible obstacles and limitations.
• Reuse existing technology: leverage existing products whenever possible, e.g. build on top of Kubewarden as admission controller.
• Focus on Rancher's use case: the ultimate goal is to be able to use this approach to solve Rancher users' needs.

Resources

Core concepts:

• ConfigMaps: Bottles could be defined and configured using ConfigMaps.
• Admission Controller: An admission controller will detect "bootled" CRDs being installed and replace the resource name used to store them.
• Aggregated API Server: By analyzing the author of a request, the aggregated API server will determine the correct bottle and route the request accordingly, making it transparent for the user.

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SUSE AI Meets the Game Board by moio

Use tabletopgames.ai’s open source TAG and PyTAG frameworks to apply Statistical Forward Planning and Deep Reinforcement Learning to two board games of our own design. On an all-green, all-open source, all-AWS stack!

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Results: Infrastructure Achievements

We successfully built and automated a containerized stack to support our AI experiments. This included:

• a Fully-Automated, One-Command, GPU-accelerated Kubernetes setup: we created an OpenTofu based script, tofu-tag, to deploy SUSE's RKE2 Kubernetes running on CUDA-enabled nodes in AWS, powered by openSUSE with GPU drivers and gpu-operator
• Containerization of the TAG and PyTAG frameworks: TAG (Tabletop AI Games) and PyTAG were patched for seamless deployment in containerized environments. We automated the container image creation process with GitHub Actions. Our forks (PRs upstream upcoming):
  • https://github.com/moio/TabletopGames/tree/hackweek24
  • https://github.com/moio/PyTAG/tree/hackweek24

./deploy.sh and voilà - Kubernetes running PyTAG (k9s, above) with GPU acceleration (nvtop, below)

Results: Game Design Insights

Our project focused on modeling and analyzing two card games of our own design within the TAG framework:

• Game Modeling: We implemented models for Dario's "Bamboo" and Silvio's "Totoro" and "R3" games, enabling AI agents to play thousands of games ...in minutes!
• AI-driven optimization: By analyzing statistical data on moves, strategies, and outcomes, we iteratively tweaked the game mechanics and rules to achieve better balance and player engagement.
• Advanced analytics: Leveraging AI agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and random action selection, we compared performance metrics to identify optimal strategies and uncover opportunities for game refinement .
  • more about Bamboo on Dario's site
  • more about R3 on Silvio's site (italian, translation coming)
  • more about Totoro on Silvio's site

A family picture of our card games in progress. From the top: Bamboo, Totoro, R3

Results: Learning, Collaboration, and Innovation

Beyond technical accomplishments, the project showcased innovative approaches to coding, learning, and teamwork:

• "Trio programming" with AI assistance: Our "trio programming" approach—two developers and GitHub Copilot—was a standout success, especially in handling slightly-repetitive but not-quite-exactly-copypaste tasks. Java as a language tends to be verbose and we found it to be fitting particularly well.
• AI tools for reporting and documentation: We extensively used AI chatbots to streamline writing and reporting. (Including writing this report! ...but this note was added manually during edit!)
• GPU compute expertise: Overcoming challenges with CUDA drivers and cloud infrastructure deepened our understanding of GPU-accelerated workloads in the open-source ecosystem.
• Game design as a learning platform: By blending AI techniques with creative game design, we learned not only about AI strategies but also about making games fun, engaging, and balanced.

Last but not least we had a lot of fun! ...and this was definitely not a chatbot generated line!

The Context: AI + Board Games

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Small healthcheck tool for Longhorn by mbrookhuis

Project Description

We have often problems (e.g. pods not starting) that are related to PVCs not running, cluster (nodes) not all up or deployments not running or completely running. This all prevents administration activities. Having something that can regular be run to validate the status of the cluster would be helpful, and not as of today do a lot of manual tasks.

As addition (read enough time), we could add changing reservation, adding new disks, etc. --> This didn't made it. But the scripts can easily be adopted.

This tool would decrease troubleshooting time, giving admins rights to the rancher GUI and could be used in automation.

Goal for this Hackweek

At the end we should have a small python tool that is doing a (very) basic health check on nodes, deployments and PVCs. First attempt was to make it in golang, but that was taking to much time.

Overview

This tool will run a simple healthcheck on a kubernetes cluster. It will perform the following actions:

• node check: This will check all nodes, and display the status and the k3s version. If the status of the nodes is not "Ready" (this should be only reported), the cluster will be reported as having problems

• deployment check: This check will list all deployments, and display the number of expected replicas and the used replica. If there are unused replicas this will be displayed. The cluster will be reported as having problems.

• pvc check: This check will list of all pvc's, and display the status and the robustness. If the robustness is not "Healthy", the cluster will be reported as having problems.

If there is a problem registered in the checks, there will be a warning that the cluster is not healthy and the program will exit with 1.

The script has 1 mandatory parameter and that is the kubeconf of the cluster or of a node off the cluster.

The code is writen for Python 3.11, but will also work on 3.6 (the default with SLES15.x). There is a venv present that will contain all needed packages. Also, the script can be run on the cluster itself or any other linux server.

Installation

To install this project, perform the following steps:

• Create the directory /opt/k8s-check

mkdir /opt/k8s-check

• Copy all the file to this directory and make the following changes:

chmod +x k8s-check.py

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Mammuthus - The NFS-Ganesha inside Kubernetes controller by vcheng

Description

As the user-space NFS provider, the NFS-Ganesha is wieldy use with serval projects. e.g. Longhorn/Rook. We want to create the Kubernetes Controller to make configuring NFS-Ganesha easy. This controller will let users configure NFS-Ganesha through different backends like VFS/CephFS.

Goals

1. Create NFS-Ganesha Package on OBS: nfs-ganesha5, nfs-ganesha6
2. Create NFS-Ganesha Container Image on OBS: Image
3. Create a Kubernetes controller for NFS-Ganesha and support the VFS configuration on demand. Mammuthus

Resources

NFS-Ganesha

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Write an url shortener in Rust (And learn in the way) by szarate

So I have 469.icu :), it's currently doing nothing... (and for sale) but in the meantime, I'd like to write an url shortener from scratch and deploy it on my own server

https://github.com/foursixnine/url-manager-rs/tree/main

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SMB3 Server written entirely in Rust by dmulder

Description

Given the number of bugs frequently discovered in the Samba code caused by memory issues, it makes sense to re-write the smbd service purely in Rust code. Meanwhile, it would be wise to abandon backwards compatibility here with insecure protocol versions, and simply implement the SMB3 spec.

Goals

Get a simple server up and running and get it merged into upstream Samba (which now has Rust build support).

Resources

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Kanidm: A safe and modern IDM system by firstyear

Kanidm is an IDM system written in Rust for modern systems authentication. The github repo has a detailed "getting started" on the readme.

Kanidm Github

In addition Kanidm has spawn a number of adjacent projects in the Rust ecosystem such as LDAP, Kerberos, Webauthn, and cryptography libraries.

In this hack week, we'll be working on Quokca, a certificate authority that supports PKCS11/TPM storage of keys, issuance of PIV certificates, and ACME without the feature gatekeeping implemented by other CA's like smallstep.

For anyone who wants to participate in Kanidm, we have documentation and developer guides which can help.

I'm happy to help and share more, so please get in touch!

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Hack on isotest-ng - a rust port of isotovideo (os-autoinst aka testrunner of openQA) by szarate

Description

Some time ago, I managed to convince ByteOtter to hack something that resembles isotovideo but in Rust, not because I believe that Perl is dead, but more because there are certain limitations in the perl code (how it was written), and its always hard to add new functionalities when they are about implementing a new backend, or fixing bugs (Along with people complaining that Perl is dead, and that they don't like it)

In reality, I wanted to see if this could be done, and ByteOtter proved that it could be, while doing an amazing job at hacking a vnc console, and helping me understand better what RuPerl needs to work.

I plan to keep working on this for the next few years, and while I don't aim for feature completion or replacing isotovideo tih isotest-ng (name in progress), I do plan to be able to use it on a daily basis, using specialized tooling with interfaces, instead of reimplementing everything in the backend

Todo

• Add make targets for testability, e.g "spawn qemu and type"
• Add image search matching algorithm
• Add a Null test distribution provider
• Add a Perl Test Distribution Provider
• Fix unittests https://github.com/os-autoinst/isotest-ng/issues/5
• Research OpenTofu how to add new hypervisors/baremetal to OpenTofu
• Add an interface to openQA cli

Goals

• Implement at least one of the above, prepare proposals for GSoC
• Boot a system via it's BMC

Resources

See https://github.com/os-autoinst/isotest-ng

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Better diff'ing experience by MSirringhaus

Description

For diff-ing directories, I usually like to use meld, but it struggles a lot with large trees. Experiment with writing a TUI meld-clone for diffing directories and files

Goals

Get first prototype going of a TUI that can show

• diffs of text-files
• diffs of directories.

Stretch goals

• Themes
• Filters (no whitespace, etc.)
• Live config changes (Show/hide line numbers, etc.)

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