Currently, when Rancher tries to provision a Kubernetes cluster on vSphere, it needs to initiate API calls to the vSphere endpoint. In a hybrid cloud environment this often means that the Rancher server is not in the same network as the vSphere endpoint. Therefore inbound access is required to be added to a firewall so Rancher can reach the vSphere system. This naturally poses a security concern and creates administrative burden on our users who have to go through a security review to get this approved.
If instead of requiring direct API access, an agent could exist inside the network where the vSphere API lived, then this agent could broker the communication between the Rancher server and the downstream API. The agent would simply initiate an outbound API connection to the Rancher server (much like any node agent or cluster agent currently) and simultaneously proxy any API calls that Rancher needs to make to vSphere. This would also have the benefit of being able to be run through a HTTP proxy, which many security teams will appreciate as a less risky connectivity model.
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Self-Scaling LLM Infrastructure Powered by Rancher
Description
The Problem
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Today there are typically two choices:
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SUSE Virtualization VM Import Documentation
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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.
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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.
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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!!!
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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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*** Warning: Are You at Risk for VOMIT? ***
Do you find yourself staring at a screen, your eyes glossing over as thousands of lines of text scroll by? Do you feel a wave of text-based nausea when someone asks you to "just check the logs"?
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HTTP API for nftables by crameleon
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The idea originated in https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/164060 and is about building RESTful API which translates authorized HTTP requests to operations in nftables, possibly utilizing libnftables-json(5).
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Goals
- Find and track the issue with google/nftables
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- Finish functionality to interact with nftables sets (retrieving and updating elements), which are of interest for the originating issue
- Align test suite
- Packaging
Resources
- https://git.netfilter.org/nftables/tree/py/src/nftables.py
- https://git.com.de/Georg/nftables-http-api (to be moved to GitHub)
- https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:crameleon:containers/pytest-nftables-container
Results
- Started new https://github.com/tacerus/nftables-http-api.
- First Go nftables issue was related to set elements needing to be added with different start and end addresses - coincidentally, this was recently discovered by someone else, who added a useful helper function for this: https://github.com/google/nftables/pull/342.
- Further improvements submitted: https://github.com/google/nftables/pull/347.
Side results
Upon starting to unify the structure and implementing more functionality, missing JSON output support was noticed for some subcommands in libnftables. Submitted patches here as well:
- https://lore.kernel.org/netfilter-devel/20251203131736.4036382-2-georg@syscid.com/T/#u