Rancher Cluster Lifecycle Visualizer by jferraz

Description

Rancher’s v2 provisioning system represents each downstream cluster with several Kubernetes custom resources across multiple API groups, such as clusters.provisioning.cattle.io and clusters.management.cattle.io. Understanding why a cluster is stuck in states like "Provisioning", "Updating", or "Unavailable" often requires jumping between these resources, reading conditions, and correlating them with agent connectivity and known failure modes. This project will build a Cluster Lifecycle Visualizer: a small, read-only controller that runs in the Rancher management cluster and generates a single, human-friendly view per cluster. It will watch Rancher cluster CRDs, derive a simplified lifecycle phase, keep a history of phase transitions from installation time onward, and attach a short, actionable recommendation string that hints at what the operator should check or do next.

Goals

• Provide a compact lifecycle summary for each Rancher-managed cluster (e.g. Provisioning, WaitingForClusterAgent, Active, Updating, Error) derived from provisioning.cattle.io/v1 Cluster and management.cattle.io/v3 Cluster status 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/v1 and management.cattle.io/v3 (from the rancher/rancher repository 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.

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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

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SUSE Virtualization (Harvester): VM Import UI flow by wombelix

Description

SUSE Virtualization (Harvester) has a vm-import-controller that allows migrating VMs from VMware and OpenStack, but users need to write manifest files and apply them with kubectl to use it. This project is about adding the missing UI pieces to the harvester-ui-extension, making VM Imports accessible without requiring Kubernetes and YAML knowledge.

VMware and OpenStack admins aren't automatically familiar with Kubernetes and YAML. Implementing the UI part for the VM Import feature makes it easier to use and more accessible. The Harvester Enhancement Proposal (HEP) VM Migration controller included a UI flow implementation in its scope. Issue #2274 received multiple comments that an UI integration would be a nice addition, and issue #4663 was created to request the implementation but eventually stalled.

Right now users need to manually create either VmwareSource or OpenstackSource resources, then write VirtualMachineImport manifests with network mappings and all the other configuration options. Users should be able to do that and track import status through the UI without writing YAML.

Work during the Hack Week will be done in this fork in a branch called suse-hack-week-25, making progress publicly visible and open for contributions. When everything works out and the branch is in good shape, it will be submitted as a pull request to harvester-ui-extension to get it included in the next Harvester release.

Testing will focus on VMware since that's what is available in the lab environment (SUSE Virtualization 1.6 single-node cluster, ESXi 8.0 standalone host). Given that this is about UI and surfacing what the vm-import-controller handles, the implementation should work for OpenStack imports as well.

This project is also a personal challenge to learn vue.js and get familiar with Rancher Extensions development, since harvester-ui-extension is built on that framework.

Goals

• Learn Vue.js and Rancher Extensions fundamentals required to finish the project
• Read and learn from other Rancher UI Extensions code, especially understanding the harvester-ui-extension code base
• Understand what the vm-import-controller and its CRDs require, identify ready to use components in the Rancher UI Extension API that can be leveraged
• Implement UI logic for creating and managing VmwareSource / OpenstackSource and VirtualMachineImport resources with all relevant configuration options and credentials
• Implemnt UI elements to display VirtualMachineImport status and errors

Resources

HEP and related discussion

• https://github.com/harvester/harvester/blob/master/enhancements/20220726-vm-migration.md
• https://github.com/harvester/harvester/issues/2274
• https://github.com/harvester/harvester/issues/4663

SUSE Virtualization VM Import Documentation

• https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.6/advanced/addons/vmimport

Rancher Extensions Documentation

• https://extensions.rancher.io/extensions/next/home

Rancher UI Plugin Examples

• https://github.com/rancher/ui-plugin-examples

Vue Router Essentials

• https://v3.router.vuejs.org/guide/

Vue Router API

• https://v3.router.vuejs.org/api/#routes

Vuex Documentation

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Liz - Prompt autocomplete by ftorchia

Description

Liz is the Rancher AI assistant for cluster operations.

Goals

We want to help users when sending new messages to Liz, by adding an autocomplete feature to complete their requests based on the context.

Example:

• User prompt: "Can you show me the list of p"
• Autocomplete suggestion: "Can you show me the list of p...od in local cluster?"

Example:

• User prompt: "Show me the logs of #rancher-"
• Chat console: It shows a drop-down widget, next to the # character, with the list of available pod names starting with "rancher-".

Technical Overview

1. The AI agent should expose a new ws/autocomplete endpoint to proxy autocomplete messages to the LLM.
2. The UI extension should be able to display prompt suggestions and allow users to apply the autocomplete to the Prompt via keyboard shortcuts.

Resources

GitHub repository

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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 Outputs

❥ A "State of the Agentic Union" for SUSE engineers, detailing what works, what explodes, and how much coffee we can drink while the robots do the rebasing.

❥ Honest, Daily Updates With All the Gory Details

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