I’ll pose this question again since I asked it a bit ago and the response was soon (TM), and sorry if it sounds mean but it’s rough that this is shipped with Rancher and the level of engagement is so low. Fleet has seemed almost dead since last year which is going on 4 months now with little to none community engagement on issues, PRs, or even here in Slack. I understand that the team has had some shifts and movement, but it’s pretty troubling from an adoption standpoint. Hoping to hear more info such as a roadmap, or something of this nature.

Of course in a way it seems like the silence is growing across the slack channels. Maybe not just fleet?

Yep, I’ve seen a lack of Rancher employees here.

TBH it's been a year+ since the acquisition and many or most of the earlier Ranchers who created the communities are no longer around.. I tried to get more newer people into a rotation for forum/slack/etc before I left, but 🤷‍♂️

Kinda makes you think if the products (fleet, rancher) will remain OS and if SUSE will keep investing in it

They spent a... considerable fraction of their company to buy us, and have a long open source history; I don't think that will be a problem.

I think Rancher yes, I'm less confident in fleet. I had debated on starting a new one or forking but I have trouble committing when something like ArgoCD exists.

@full-painter-23916 yes that's true. I guess Slack is not a priority then?

Because if you look at the actual moving parts only fleet uses fleet and it wasn't included until recently. We're also on month 5 of no major changes or communication.

Interesting. Do you believe that they will change it at some point? Honestly awhile ago I was thinking about using ArgoCD instead.

I'm not sure, but the lack of engagement causes you to wonder. I'd be different if you could see movement or engagement but you see neither right now.

@straight-fireman-71417 we’re working on it Bear with us a little bit longer

Hey @careful-piano-35019 we are heavily dependent on fleet (via rancher). It would be great to receive some updates regarding @straight-fireman-71417 concerns.

Hey, I’ve been looking into fleet over the last week. I still have some minor responsibilities with the #epinio team, but will do 100% fleet in the near future. I’m very excited about this 🙂

I was told by a SUSE/Rancher territory manager just last week the following:

In regards to the community slack channel, there is not anyone from SUSE that checks that. When you pay for support with us, you get a dedicated slack channel where you can bounce ideas and problems off there.

Well… certainly ‘not anyone’ is a strong statement :) But if you expect commitments on support, that’s where you need the support contracts Just like openSUSE Leap and SLES or CentOS and RHEL

I have had a lot of frustration with fleet, see my post from last week. I am definitely considering moving to ArgoCD. I used it a few years ago (at a different company) and it worked well. I would have gone with it this time but people wanted to use Rancher and fleet was integrated. To be honest, if I move off fleet I don't know if we have much a case for rancher as a whole (we are a small shop). There is no way we can pay what they want to get support for a product that doesn't work well out of the box.

I'd have to agree as well really, we've already started looking at the move to argocd

@careful-piano-35019 That was copy pasted straight from her email. I don't expect commitments on support. But they loose by not having any engagement. Lets compare two seperate opensource projects owned by major software companies that I have had in the past few months. My problems with Rancher started at least 3 months ago. I have posted in slack and created a github issue. I have gotten no response. I reached out another way and was basically told to get anyone to talk to me, we had to pay:

Rancher server, standard support Mon-Friday 8x5 $37,500 MSRP
Rancher nodes 10 pack (we have to start with 10 pack), standard support $9,400 MSRP

Compare that to the issue I had with Karpenter, an open source project run by AWS. I brought up an issue on their slack and had a dev ask me to create a github issue on it. We worked together to figure out what was going on and uncovered a bug with containerd. He created a pull request on the containerd project to solve it. In this case I provided testing resources and knowledge and everyone, including you, will benefit from that effort. I have doubled down on use of Karpenter instead of looking for a different solutions.

@careful-piano-35019 I hope at SuSE this feedback isn't disregarded. This will be extremely helpful to SuSE moving forward if it's listened too.

But if you expect commitments on support, that’s where you need the support contracts

As Matt said, the numbers for paid support do not make sense.

Interestingly, I posted something somewhere about this today and was privately contacted by a Rancher Engineer who told me that he would recommend other products over fleet at this point. Kinda seals the deal for me. I just need to sort out how to move.

@freezing-holiday-13112 it is not disregarded