MISSION-CONTROL // SYS SUSE EDGE 3.5 UPLINK NOMINAL

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Demo

Ground Control
to All Ships

SUSE Edge 3.5 // Mission Control

A live edge computing demo running on a fleet of Raspberry Pi boards and x86 NUCs. One management plane. Five vessels. Three provisioning methods. Zero manual config after launch.

View on GitHub

// Architecture

How It Fits Together

Mission Control manages the full fleet from a single pane. Fleet pulls from GitHub and routes the right Kustomize overlay to each vessel based on labels.

Mission Control Architecture Diagram

// Fleet status

The Fleet

Every vessel runs the same app — alien-geeko — deployed automatically by Fleet the moment the cluster appears in Rancher. No SSH. No manual apply. The app shows live cluster vitals directly in the browser.

Vessel
Hardware
Provisioning
Mission Control
x86 NUC // SL Micro 6.2
Manual — Rancher + Fleet + Elemental
Vessel Alpha
Raspberry Pi 4 // SL Micro 6.2
EIB — pre-built image, zero config on boot
Vessel Beta
x86 NUC // SL Micro 6.2
Elemental — phones home, self-registers
Vessel Delta-k3s
Raspberry Pi 5 // openSUSE Tumbleweed
Rancher Import + k3s
Vessel Delta-RKE2
Raspberry Pi 5 // openSUSE Tumbleweed
Rancher Import + RKE2

// Provisioning paths

Three Ways to Launch a Vessel

Every edge environment is different. SUSE Edge 3.5 covers all three scenarios in a single platform.

EIB // Edge Image Builder

Pre-Program the Flight

Build a raw disk image with the OS, k3s, users, and SSH keys baked in. Write it to SD card with dd. Boot the Pi. It joins the fleet on first power-on. No network calls. No interactive setup.

Elemental // Phone-Home

Signal Acquired

Boot from an Elemental-enabled image. The node calls back to Rancher automatically, appears in the Elemental inventory, and waits for cluster assignment. Fleet delivers the workload within seconds.

Rancher Import

Hailing Frequencies Open

Install k3s or RKE2 on any Linux. Apply one kubectl command from Rancher. The cluster agent establishes contact. Fleet takes it from there. Used for Pi 5 boards not yet supported in SL Micro.

// Application

alien-geeko

A Node.js app that queries the Kubernetes API at runtime and renders live cluster vitals in a Nostromo CRT terminal UI. No database. No persistent storage. Just a service account token, the K8s API, and a 60-second cache to go easy on the Pi.

The same container image runs on amd64 and arm64. Fleet picks the right overlay per cluster via Kustomize — the only thing that changes is the cluster display name in the UI. 

# What the app surfaces per cluster
GET /api/info

{
  "clusterName":   "VESSEL-ALPHA",
  "k8sVersion":    "v1.29.3+k3s1",
  "distribution":  "k3s",
  "nodeCount":     1,
  "arch":          "arm64",
  "osImage":       "SL-Micro 6.2",
  "nodeRole":      "control-plane",
  "cpuCount":      4,
  "loadAvg":       "0.42 0.38 0.31"
}

// Stack

Built On

SUSE Edge 3.5 SL Micro 6.2 openSUSE Tumbleweed Edge Image Builder Elemental Rancher Fleet k3s RKE2 Kubernetes Kustomize Node.js Raspberry Pi 4 Raspberry Pi 5 x86 NUC

// Deployment

Deploy to Your Fleet

Clone the repo, label your clusters in Rancher, add the GitRepo. Fleet does the rest.

# 1. Add the GitRepo in Rancher
Continuous Delivery > Git Repos > Add Repository
URL:    https://github.com/avaleror/alien-geeko-demo
Branch: main

# 2. Label your clusters
demo=true  +  edge-type=pi-cluster       → Vessel Alpha overlay
demo=true  +  edge-type=x86-elemental    → Vessel Beta overlay
demo=true  +  edge-type=pi5-k3s         → Delta-k3s overlay
demo=true  +  edge-type=pi5-rke2        → Delta-RKE2 overlay
demo=true  +  edge-type=x86-cluster     → Mission Control overlay

# 3. Verify
kubectl auth can-i list nodes \
  --as=system:serviceaccount:alien-geeko:alien-geeko
yes