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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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

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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?

Project Repository: github.com/alexander-demicev/llmserverless

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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
• Cluster Autoscaler scales nodes up/down as needed
• Fleet keeps everything in sync via GitOps

Goals

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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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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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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 and Salt-ssh clients, but NOT traditional clients, which are deprecated.

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 :-)

Pending

Debian 13

The new version of the beloved Debian GNU/Linux OS

Seems to be a Debian 12 derivative, so adding it could be quite easy.

• [ ] Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
• W] Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap script, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
• [ ] Package management (install, remove, update...)
• [ ] Patching (if patch information is available, could require writing some code to parse it, but IIRC we have support for Ubuntu already). Probably not for Debian as IIRC we don't support patches yet.
• [ ] Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
• [ ] Salt remote commands
• [ ] Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
• [ ] Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
• [ ] Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)

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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: Multi-node cluster

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

• Create a multi-node cluster
• Deploy application
• 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

step 3: Automate day 2

Goal: Trigger the application deployment and update from MLM

• Salt states For application (with static data)
  • Deploy the application helmchart, if not present
  • Update/deploy the SUC?
  • Update/deploy the SUC CRD with the update procedure
• Salt states to deploy k3s cluster?
• 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
  • Update git SUC - CR and apply the state to trigger the update of the machine.
• Recurrent state applying configuration channel?

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