Flatcar Container Linux

Term 3 · Sep-Nov · 2 projects

• Cloud-Init to Butane YAML config transpiler

  LFX Mentorship · Listed in the official cohort

  @tormath1Source IssueLFX portal

  This is a software development project (Go language) for transpiling from one well-defined YAML format (cloud-config) into another (butane). The project aims to implement the minimum functionality necessary to support ClusterAPI worker node provisioning. This limits the transpiler's scope to support only basic Butane features (users, groups, certificates, files, systemd units, etc.). While the project itself is well scoped and both formats the transpiler is supposed to work with are well defined, it exists in a complex environment of Linux OS operations and OS provisioning. Mentors are aware and will give support and guidance, in particular with: - scope, goals, and non-goals - on-boarding, development loop, and local testing - integration with Flatcar and ClusterAPI

  • Go
  • YAML
  • ClusterAPI
  • Linux Based OS

• Nebraska Reporting & Metrics Uplift

  LFX Mentorship · Listed in the official cohort

  @John15321Source IssueLFX portal

  Nebraska is Flatcar Container Linux's update server: Flatcar machines periodically check in with it to ask "is there a newer OS version for me?", and Nebraska tracks the fleet's update status and lets operators control how rollouts happen. This project is a set of four improvements to Nebraska's own reporting and metrics - the dashboards and monitoring numbers operators rely on - each of which stands alone and can be built entirely within the Nebraska stack. The four pieces: 1. Distribution report - surfaces information Nebraska already records but never displays, such as which hardware/cloud platform (the "OEM", e.g. AWS, Azure, VMware) each machine runs on. Built end to end as a database query, a backend API endpoint, a chart in the web dashboard, and a monitoring metric. 2. Faster reporting pages - speeding up reporting pages that are currently slow, by finding the bottleneck and fixing the underlying database query or index, measured with concrete before/after numbers. 3. Index cleanup - cleaning up redundant database indexes that have accumulated over time on frequently-written tables. 4. Broader monitoring coverage - broadening Nebraska's monitoring coverage (for example, per-group rollout progress and update failure rates) so operators can watch fleet health in tools like Prometheus and Grafana. The mentee is not expected to complete all four; the exact selection and order can be settled with the maintainers. A natural place to start is the distribution report - it is small and well-defined, yet touches every layer of the stack (database, API, frontend, metrics), which makes it an ideal way to learn the whole system before taking on the others. By the end of the term the mentee should have delivered at least one of these pieces end to end, with the option to continue into further pieces as time allows.

  • SQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Go
  • REST API
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • +3