Guest post originally published on Ankit’s blog by Ankit Jain, Sr DevOps Engineer at Razorpay and LFX/CommunityBridge Mentee

Hey folks, I am Ankit Jain, and currently working as an Infrastructure (DevOps) Engineer at Razorpay. I have successfully graduated from the CNCF CommunityBridge mentorship program. In this blog post, I will be sharing my experience of contributing to Keptn, CNCF sandbox project as a Linux Foundation’s CommunityBridge Program Mentee.

What is CommunityBridge Program?

CommunityBridge program (which is now known as LFX Mentorship program) is the Linux Foundation’s initiative to indulge more people in the open-source community similar to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. Each selected Mentee works on an open-source project for a term of 3 months approx under the assigned Mentors who guide and help them with the project completion.

I have been following the CNCF community and hence got to know about this program and thinking to apply for this program from last one year but unfortunately either I miss the deadline or stuck in something else. I have been constantly trying to make some good open-source contribution to CNCF projects. It’s kinda challenging to find proper time for the open-source contribution along with a full-time job which is equally amazing and exciting.

I was constantly following the CNCF blog and tracking the status for the Fall 2020 CommunityBridge Program. Out of 22 projects ideas from 12 graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects I submitted my application for the CNCF sandbox project Keptn, as their project idea was most appealing to me. Keptn proposed two project ideas and one of them directly caught my eye.

Why Keptn?

Keptn is a data-driven control-plane for continuous delivery and automated operations for cloud-native applications. Keptn is a CNCF sandbox project and has been selected for the first time under the LFX Mentorship program.

I liked the project idea i.e “Keptn CLI to support multiple contexts like KUBECONFIG“ since it fits completely with my skill set. Also, I am fond of CI/CD tools and love to explore them. The other reason for me choosing this project is because I have worked/developed a tool called “Ingress Concierge“ which is used to create leases for incoming connections to Kubernetes Ingress Objects. Under this project, I have added the feature to use multi-contexts so I am kinda confident with Keptn’s project idea and how to implement the project.

How did I start with Keptn?

Keptn has beautiful documentation 😍, a great set of tutorials and awesome developer community which helped me a lot to set up and run Keptn locally. I started finding “Good First Issue” so I can have a good understanding of code and can start contributing to the community before the application submission. I also started spending some time on the project idea and tried picking some small tasks before the selection. I made some good amount of contributions by making more than 5 Pull requests and all were merged which gave me confidence.

Keptn has the weekly developer meeting and Jürgen Etzlstorfer invited me and asked me to present my work in their next community meeting. I was excited and a little nervous but all went good. I have already submitted my application for the program and eagerly waiting for the results.

Working as a CommunityBridge Mentee

Finally, the results were out and I was officially working as a CommunityBridge Mentee for Keptn organization.

We had an introductory meeting with all the mentors where we decided on the structure of the program and collaboration between mentors and mentees since this program was new for both of us like weekly meeting with mentors, a separate slack channel for mentees to discuss, issues to track the progress and others. The mentors also asked me to write the doc on the “Project Timeline & Implementation Plan” which helped me to align my tasks in an efficient way and to manage my time accordingly.

After months of work, multiple pull requests, weekly meetings, discussions and mentor’s reviews & feedback, I completed my project successfully a week before the final deadline. I gave the complete demo of my project to my mentors and also presented my work in the Keptn Community Meeting. You can find the demo here.

I would like to thank my mentors Jürgen Etzlstorfer, Johannes Bräuer, Florian Bacher and Christian Kreuzberger. I really appreciate you all. It’s really a great learning experience for me ❤️. I would definitely recommend participating in a mentorship program and recommend Keptn to new mentees.

Feel free to comment and ask me anything. You can follow me on Twitter:@ankitjain28may and Medium. Thanks for reading!