SUSE/OpenSUSE: Harvester Milestone and Digest of YaST Development Sprint

2021 has been a memorable year for the Harvester team. In May, SUSE hosted the first virtual SUSECON, where we announced the beta release of Harvester, alongside a cast of new innovative open source projects from the SUSE Rancher engineering team. In October, for the first time in two years, we were able to meet our industry peers and the community face-to-face at KubeCon North America where we announced Harvester’s plans to integrate with our leading Kubernetes management platform SUSE Rancher.

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Harvester is a 100% free-to-use, open source modern hyperconverged infrastructure solution that is built on a foundation of cloud native solutions including Kubernetes, Longhorn and Kubevirt. It has been designed as an enterprise-ready turnkey solution that gives operators a familiar operating experience like other proprietary HCI solutions in the market.

Exactly one year ago, we announced the alpha availability of the project Harvester, an open Source Hypercoverged Infrastructure solution. During this last year, the team has been working hard on developing the project and we brought you the beta release of v0.2.0 and v0.3.0. Throughout the last year, we’ve received many queries from our users and the community, asking when Harvester will be in production.

As you may know, YaST has the ability to update itself at the very beginning of the installation of the operating system. That makes possible to correct the installation process in case errors are detected after publishing a given release of SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Recently we found there was room for improving the speed and also to simplify how the mechanism works in some scenarios. It’s hard to explain exactly what we did in only a few words… so we will not try. But if you don’t mind reading quite some words and watching a couple of animations, go and check the description of this pull request.

Apart from the already mentioned improvements, we also extended the YaST self-update to support relative URLs. Check the details in this separate pull request.