Technical talks at universities by agamez

Description

This project aims to empower the next generation of tech professionals by offering hands-on workshops on containerization and Kubernetes, with a strong focus on open-source technologies. By providing practical experience with these cutting-edge tools and fostering a deep understanding of open-source principles, we aim to bridge the gap between academia and industry.

For now, the scope is limited to Spanish universities, since we already have the contacts and have started some conversations.

Goals

• Technical Skill Development: equip students with the fundamental knowledge and skills to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications using open-source tools like Kubernetes.
• Open-Source Mindset: foster a passion for open-source software, encouraging students to contribute to open-source projects and collaborate with the global developer community.
• Career Readiness: prepare students for industry-relevant roles by exposing them to real-world use cases, best practices, and open-source in companies.

Resources

• Instructors: experienced open-source professionals with deep knowledge of containerization and Kubernetes.
• SUSE Expertise: leverage SUSE's expertise in open-source technologies to provide insights into industry trends and best practices.

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Help Create A Chat Control Resistant Turnkey Chatmail/Deltachat Relay Stack - Rootless Podman Compose, OpenSUSE BCI, Hardened, & SELinux by 3nd5h1771fy

Description

The Mission: Decentralized & Sovereign Messaging

FYI: If you have never heard of "Chatmail", you can visit their site here, but simply put it can be thought of as the underlying protocol/platform decentralized messengers like DeltaChat use for their communications. Do not confuse it with the honeypot looking non-opensource paid for prodect with better seo that directs you to chatmailsecure(dot)com

In an era of increasing centralized surveillance by unaccountable bad actors (aka BigTech), "Chat Control," and the erosion of digital privacy, the need for sovereign communication infrastructure is critical. Chatmail is a pioneering initiative that bridges the gap between classic email and modern instant messaging, offering metadata-minimized, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) communication that is interoperable and open.

However, unless you are a seasoned sysadmin, the current recommended deployment method of a Chatmail relay is rigid, fragile, difficult to properly secure, and effectively takes over the entire host the "relay" is deployed on.

Why This Matters

A simple, host agnostic, reproducible deployment lowers the entry cost for anyone wanting to run a privacy‑preserving, decentralized messaging relay. In an era of perpetually resurrected chat‑control legislation threats, EU digital‑sovereignty drives, and many dangers of using big‑tech messaging platforms (Apple iMessage, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Instagram, SMS, Google Messages, etc...) for any type of communication, providing an easy‑to‑use alternative empowers:

• Censorship resistance - No single entity controls the relay; operators can spin up new nodes quickly.
  
• Surveillance mitigation - End‑to‑end OpenPGP encryption ensures relay operators never see plaintext.
  
• Digital sovereignty - Communities can host their own infrastructure under local jurisdiction, aligning with national data‑policy goals.
  

By turning the Chatmail relay into a plug‑and‑play container stack, we enable broader adoption, foster a resilient messaging fabric, and give developers, activists, and hobbyists a concrete tool to defend privacy online.

Goals

As I indicated earlier, this project aims to drastically simplify the deployment of Chatmail relay. By converting this architecture into a portable, containerized stack using Podman and OpenSUSE base container images, we can allow anyone to deploy their own censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving communications node in minutes.

Our goal for Hack Week: package every component into containers built on openSUSE/MicroOS base images, initially orchestrated with a single container-compose.yml (podman-compose compatible). The stack will:

• Run on any host that supports Podman (including optimizations and enhancements for SELinux‑enabled systems).
  
• Allow network decoupling by refactoring configurations to move from file-system constrained Unix sockets to internal TCP networking, allowing containers achieve stricter isolation.
• Utilize Enhanced Security with SELinux by using purpose built utilities such as udica we can quickly generate custom SELinux policies for the container stack, ensuring strict confinement superior to standard/typical Docker deployments.
• Allow the use of bind or remote mounted volumes for shared data (/var/vmail, DKIM keys, TLS certs, etc.).
  
• Replace the local DNS server requirement with a remote DNS‑provider API for DKIM/TXT record publishing.
  

By delivering a turnkey, host agnostic, reproducible deployment, we lower the barrier for individuals and small communities to launch their own chatmail relays, fostering a decentralized, censorship‑resistant messaging ecosystem that can serve DeltaChat users and/or future services adopting this protocol

Resources

• The links included above
• https://chatmail.at/doc/relay/
• https://delta.chat/en/help
• Project repo -> https://codeberg.org/EndShittification/containerized-chatmail-relay

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Rewrite Distrobox in go (POC) by fabriziosestito

Description

Rewriting Distrobox in Go.

Main benefits:

• Easier to maintain and to test
• Adapter pattern for different container backends (LXC, systemd-nspawn, etc.)

Goals

• Build a minimal starting point with core commands
• Keep the CLI interface compatible: existing users shouldn't notice any difference
• Use a clean Go architecture with adapters for different container backends
• Keep dependencies minimal and binary size small
• Benchmark against the original shell script

Resources

• Upstream project: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/
• Distrobox site: https://distrobox.it/
• ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Distrobox

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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

1. Deliver the v1beta1 API and its corresponding controller implementation
2. 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

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Exploring Modern AI Trends and Kubernetes-Based AI Infrastructure by jluo

Description

Build a solid understanding of the current landscape of Artificial Intelligence and how modern cloud-native technologies—especially Kubernetes—support AI workloads.

Goals

Use Gemini Learning Mode to guide the exploration, surface relevant concepts, and structure the learning journey:

• Gain insight into the latest AI trends, tools, and architectural concepts.
• Understand how Kubernetes and related cloud-native technologies are used in the AI ecosystem (model training, deployment, orchestration, MLOps).

Resources

• Red Hat AI Topic Articles

  • https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/ai

• Kubeflow Documentation

  • https://www.kubeflow.org/docs/

• Q4 2025 CNCF Technology Landscape Radar report:

  • https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2025/11/11/cncf-and-slashdata-report-finds-leading-ai-tools-gaining-adoption-in-cloud-native-ecosystems/
  • https://www.cncf.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/cncfreporttechradar_111025a.pdf

• Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Protocol

  • https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/

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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

• Build a frontend website (Angular) that helps customers create Jira SD tickets.
• Build a backend (Rust with Axum) for the backend, which would do all the hard work for the frontend.

Resources (SUSE VPN only)

• development site: https://ui-dev.openplatform.suse.com/login?returnUrl=%2Fopenplatform%2Fforms
• https://gitlab.suse.de/itpe/core/open-platform/op-portal/backend
• https://gitlab.suse.de/itpe/core/open-platform/op-portal/frontend

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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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Technical talks at universities by agamez

Description

This project aims to empower the next generation of tech professionals by offering hands-on workshops on containerization and Kubernetes, with a strong focus on open-source technologies. By providing practical experience with these cutting-edge tools and fostering a deep understanding of open-source principles, we aim to bridge the gap between academia and industry.

For now, the scope is limited to Spanish universities, since we already have the contacts and have started some conversations.

Goals

• Technical Skill Development: equip students with the fundamental knowledge and skills to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications using open-source tools like Kubernetes.
• Open-Source Mindset: foster a passion for open-source software, encouraging students to contribute to open-source projects and collaborate with the global developer community.
• Career Readiness: prepare students for industry-relevant roles by exposing them to real-world use cases, best practices, and open-source in companies.

Resources

• Instructors: experienced open-source professionals with deep knowledge of containerization and Kubernetes.
• SUSE Expertise: leverage SUSE's expertise in open-source technologies to provide insights into industry trends and best practices.

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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

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HbAvgrg8T3pd1FIx74nEfCObCljpO77zz5In_Jpw4as/edit?usp=sharing## Description

Project Achievements during Hackweek

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

https://docs.google.com/document/d/14gtG9-ZvVpBgkh33Z4AM6iLFWqZcicQPD41MM-Pg0/edit?usp=sharing

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Uyuni read-only replica by cbosdonnat

Description

For now, there is no possible HA setup for Uyuni. The idea is to explore setting up a read-only shadow instance of an Uyuni and make it as useful as possible.

Possible things to look at:

• live sync of the database, probably using the WAL. Some of the tables may have to be skipped or some features disabled on the RO instance (taskomatic, PXT sessions…)
• Can we use a load balancer that routes read-only queries to either instance and the other to the RW one? For example, packages or PXE data can be served by both, the API GET requests too. The rest would be RW.

Goals

• Prepare a document explaining how to do it.
• PR with the needed code changes to support it

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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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Enhance setup wizard for Uyuni by PSuarezHernandez

Description

This project wants to enhance the intial setup on Uyuni after its installation, so it's easier for a user to start using with it.

Uyuni currently uses "uyuni-tools" (mgradm) as the installation entrypoint, to trigger the installation of Uyuni in the given host, but does not really perform an initial setup, for instance:

• user creation
• adding products / channels
• generating bootstrap repos
• create activation keys
• ...

Goals

• Provide initial setup wizard as part of mgradm uyuni installation

Resources

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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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Uyuni Health-check Grafana AI Troubleshooter by ygutierrez

Description

This project explores the feasibility of using the open-source Grafana LLM plugin to enhance the Uyuni Health-check tool with LLM capabilities. The idea is to integrate a chat-based "AI Troubleshooter" directly into existing dashboards, allowing users to ask natural-language questions about errors, anomalies, or performance issues.

Goals

• Investigate if and how the grafana-llm-app plug-in can be used within the Uyuni Health-check tool.
• Investigate if this plug-in can be used to query LLMs for troubleshooting scenarios.
• Evaluate support for local LLMs and external APIs through the plugin.
• Evaluate if and how the Uyuni MCP server could be integrated as another source of information.

Resources

Grafana LMM plug-in

Uyuni Health-check

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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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Enhance setup wizard for Uyuni by PSuarezHernandez

Description

This project wants to enhance the intial setup on Uyuni after its installation, so it's easier for a user to start using with it.

Uyuni currently uses "uyuni-tools" (mgradm) as the installation entrypoint, to trigger the installation of Uyuni in the given host, but does not really perform an initial setup, for instance:

• user creation
• adding products / channels
• generating bootstrap repos
• create activation keys
• ...

Goals

• Provide initial setup wizard as part of mgradm uyuni installation

Resources

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Set Uyuni to manage edge clusters at scale by RDiasMateus

Description

Prepare a Poc on how to use MLM to manage edge clusters. Those cluster are normally equal across each location, and we have a large number of them.

The goal is to produce a set of sets/best practices/scripts to help users manage this kind of setup.

Goals

step 1: Manual set-up

Goal: Have a running application in k3s and be able to update it using System Update Controler (SUC)

• Deploy Micro 6.2 machine

• Deploy k3s - single node

  • https://docs.k3s.io/quick-start

• Build/find a simple web application (static page)

  • Build/find a helmchart to deploy the application

• Deploy the application on the k3s cluster

• Install App updates through helm update

• Install OS updates using MLM

step 2: Automate day 1

Goal: Trigger the application deployment and update from MLM

• Salt states For application (with static data)
  • Deploy the application helmchart, if not present
  • install app updates through helmchart parameters
• Link it to GIT
  • Define how to link the state to the machines (based in some pillar data? Using configuration channels by importing the state? Naming convention?)
  • Use git update to trigger helmchart app update
• Recurrent state applying configuration channel?

step 3: Multi-node cluster

Goal: Use SUC to update a multi-node cluster.

• Create a multi-node cluster
• Deploy application
  • call the helm update/install only on control plane?
• Install App updates through helm update
• Prepare a SUC for OS update (k3s also? How?)
  • https://github.com/rancher/system-upgrade-controller
  • https://documentation.suse.com/cloudnative/k3s/latest/en/upgrades/automated.html
  • Update/deploy the SUC?
  • Update/deploy the SUC CRD with the update procedure

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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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A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied

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:

• GitHub Actions
• 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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Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher by ademicev0

Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher

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Description

The Problem

Running LLMs can get expensive and complex pretty quickly.

Today there are typically two choices:

1. Use cloud APIs like OpenAI or Anthropic. Easy to start with, but costs add up at scale.
2. 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

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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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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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