What's Up With Rancher Fleet?

Several months ago, I moved from working on Rancher Desktop to work on Fleet. At the time, there wasn’t much development of Fleet and there were a lot of questions with it. Some of those were around feature requests, some of those were around bugs, and some of those were around the level of SUSE Rancher investment in Fleet.

I think actions speak louder than words. Now that we have two releases with Fleet changes behind us, I can show some of the things that have been happening.

Active Development

The following image shows the activity on GitHub:

Fleet Activity

This is when a team of people started to work on Fleet. Two of those team members are in the top 3 human contributors to the project. They are regularly active and there is a team dedicated to working on it.

On the right side, you can see where activity increased. At the start of May, new activity began and it has been consistent since then.

Investment In Testing

Whenever someone new joins development of a project there is going to be a time period to get up to speed on the existing codebase. In that onboarding time one of the things the team focused on was testing and stability. Adding tests and fixing bugs is a great way to get started.

Now, you’ll see pull requests have numerous tests including running Fleet as part of End to End tests:

tests on a pull request

Releases With Improvements

We’ve had 3 releases since I started working on Fleet including v0.3.10, v0.3.11, and v0.4.0. There’s already a release candidate for v0.5.0 which we know is coming. Fleet is now following Semantic Versioning where new features are in minor or major releases.

Each one of these releases has better test coverage than previous ones.

Better Docs

The fleet docs site has been revamped:

New Docs Site

The change isn’t just in the design. For example, to better convey what you can get in a version there are versioned docs.

General Investment In Fleet

There is a general investment in Fleet. After more than 5 months of regular development activity and multiple releases with increasing levels of change and improvement you can see the change happening.

More is to come.