Agama installer on-line demo by lslezak

Description

The Agama installer provides a quite complex user interface. We have some screenshots on the web page but as it is basically a web application it would be nice to have some on-line demo where users could click and check it live.

The problem is that the Agama server directly accesses the hardware (storage probing) and loads installation repositories. We cannot easily mock this in the on-line demo so the easiest way is to have just a read-only demo. You could explore the configuration options but you could not change anything, all changes would be ignored.

The read-only demo would be a bit limited but I still think it would be useful for potential users get the feeling of the new Agama installer and get familiar with it before using in a real installation.

As a proof of concept I already created this on-line demo.

The implementation basically builds Agama in two modes - recording mode where it saves all REST API responses and replay mode where it for the REST API requests returns the previously recorded responses. Recording in the browser is inconvenient and error prone, there should be some scripting instead (see below).

Goals

• Create an Agama on-line demo which can be easily tested by users
• The Agama installer is still in alpha phase and in active development, the online demo needs to be easily rebuilt with the latest Agama version
• Ideally there should be some automation so the demo page is rebuilt automatically without any developer interactions (once a day or week?)

TODO

• Use OpenAPI to get all Agama REST API endpoints, write a script which queries all the endpoints automatically and saves the collected data to a file (see this related PR).
• Write a script for starting an Agama VM (use libvirt/qemu?), the script should ensure we always use the same virtual HW so if we need to dump the latest REST API state we get the same (or very similar data). This should ensure the demo page does not change much regarding the storage proposal etc...
• Fix changing the product, currently it gets stuck after clicking the "Select" button.
• Move the mocking data (the recorded REST API responses) outside the Agama sources, it's too big and will be probably often updated. To avoid messing the history keep it in a separate GitHub repository
• Allow changing the UI language
• Display some note (watermark) in the page so it is clear it is a read-only demo (probably with some version or build date to know how old it is)
• Automation for building new demo page from the latest sources. There should be some check which ensures the recorded data still matches the OpenAPI specification.

Changing the UI language

This will be quite tricky because selecting the proper translation file is done on the server side. We would probably need to completely re-implement the logic in the browser side and adapt the server for that.

Also some REST API responses contain translated texts (storage proposal, pattern names in software). We would need to query the respective endpoints in all supported languages and return the correct response in runtime according to the currently selected language.

Resources

• Agama sources
• Experimental proof of concept demo
• The respective source code change

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Rancher microfrontend extensions by ftorchia

Description

Rancher UI Extensions allow users, developers, partners, and customers to extend and enhance the Rancher UI. Extensions are Helm charts that can only be installed once into a cluster. The charts contain a UI built package that is downloaded and linked to the Host UI at runtime; this means that the extension pkg needs to be implemented using the same technology and have the same APIs as Rancher UI.

Goals

We want to create a new type of Rancher extension, based on microfrontend pattern. The extension is served in a docker container in the k8s clusters and embedded in the host UI; this would guarantee us to be able to create extensions unrelated to the rancher UI architecture, in any technology.

Non Goals

We want to apply the microfrontend pattern to the product-level extensions; we don't want to apply it to cluster-level extensions.

Resources

rancher-extension-microfrontend, Rancher extensions

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Enabling Rancher as an OIDC Provider by rcabello

Description

Kubernetes supports OpenID Connect (OIDC) natively as an authentication mechanism, enabling token-based user authentication. This can be configured through flags in the Kubernetes API server or by using AuthenticationConfiguration.

The purpose of this project is to enable Rancher to function as an OIDC provider, allowing Rancher's local cluster to act as an OIDC identity provider for downstream clusters. This setup will allow users to authenticate directly with downstream clusters without relying on Rancher’s proxy and impersonation mechanisms.

Rancher will continue to support all authentication providers. When a user attempts to log in via the Rancher OIDC provider, they will be redirected to the authentication provider configured in Rancher.

This approach also facilitates integration with third-party tools (e.g StackState)

Goals

• Implement Rancher as an OIDC provider using the ORY Fosite library, focusing only on the essential functionality required for basic integration.
• Enable downstream clusters to authenticate using JWT tokens issued by Rancher.
• Configure StackState to authenticate using Rancher as an OIDC provider.

Resources

https://github.com/ory/fosite

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Cluster API Provider for Harvester by rcase

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

Goals for HackWeek 2024

• Add support for ClusterClass
• Add e2e testing
• Add more Unit Tests
• Improve Status Conditions to reflect current state of Infrastructure
• Improve CI (some bugs for release creation)
• Testing with newer Harvester version (v1.3.X and v1.4.X)
• Due to the length and complexity of the templates, maybe package some of them as Helm Charts.
• Other improvement suggestions are welcome!

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

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:

• Cluster infrastructure provider contract
• Machine infrastructure provider contract
• Provider implementers guide

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CVE portal for SUSE Rancher products by gmacedo

Description

Currently it's a bit difficult for users to quickly see the list of CVEs affecting images in Rancher, RKE2, Harvester and Longhorn releases. Users need to individually look for each CVE in the SUSE CVE database page - https://www.suse.com/security/cve/ . This is not optimal, because those CVE pages are a bit hard to read and contain data for all SLE and BCI products too, making it difficult to easily see only the CVEs affecting the latest release of Rancher, for example. We understand that certain costumers are only looking for CVE data for Rancher and not SLE or BCI.

Goals

The objective is to create a simple to read and navigate page that contains only CVE data related to Rancher, RKE2, Harvester and Longhorn, where it's easy to search by a CVE ID, an image name or a release version. The page should also provide the raw data as an exportable CSV file.

It must be an MVP with the minimal amount of effort/time invested, but still providing great value to our users and saving the wasted time that the Rancher Security team needs to spend by manually sharing such data. It might not be long lived, as it can be replaced in 2-3 years with a better SUSE wide solution.

Resources

• The page must be simple and easy to read.
• The UI/UX must be as straightforward as possible with minimal visual noise.
• The content must be created automatically from the raw data that we already have internally.
• It must be updated automatically on a daily basis and on ad-hoc runs (when needed).
• The CVE status must be aligned with VEX.
• The raw data must be exportable as CSV file.
• Ideally it will be written in Go or pure Shell script with basic HTML and no external dependencies in CSS or JS.

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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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Rancher microfrontend extensions by ftorchia

Description

Rancher UI Extensions allow users, developers, partners, and customers to extend and enhance the Rancher UI. Extensions are Helm charts that can only be installed once into a cluster. The charts contain a UI built package that is downloaded and linked to the Host UI at runtime; this means that the extension pkg needs to be implemented using the same technology and have the same APIs as Rancher UI.

Goals

We want to create a new type of Rancher extension, based on microfrontend pattern. The extension is served in a docker container in the k8s clusters and embedded in the host UI; this would guarantee us to be able to create extensions unrelated to the rancher UI architecture, in any technology.

Non Goals

We want to apply the microfrontend pattern to the product-level extensions; we don't want to apply it to cluster-level extensions.

Resources

rancher-extension-microfrontend, Rancher extensions

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