Congratulations to the 36 interns who have graduated from the LFX Program after working with CNCF projects over June, July, and August!
Mentees had the opportunity to work on many different projects across our Graduated, Incubating, and Sandbox projects including Armada, Cilium, the CNCF Landscape, Jaeger, Knative, Kyverno, Meshery, and many many more!
Additional details on the CNCF projects, mentors, and mentees who successfully completed the program can be found below and on GitHub.
Mentee profile highlights
Strimzi
The project I worked on was the MQTT-Kafka Bridge, which is a bridge that allows you to produce messages to Kafka topics using the MQTT protocol. It enables one-way communication and mapping between MQTT and Kafka topics. This mapping makes it possible to integrate MQTT-based devices into an Apache Kafka cluster with interoperability and flexibility.
Mentee: António Pedro (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Paolo Patierno, Kyle Liberti
“No doubt, my mentors were the best part of my mentorship journey. I have them as my sensei because they played a crucial role in shaping my understanding of the technical aspects and the open source culture. Their patience in answering my queries, willingness to guide me through challenges, and encouragement to explore different approaches were invaluable. This collaborative environment extended beyond my immediate mentors, as the Strimzi community was always ready to provide insights and support whenever I reached out. And, of course, I am glad I can count on my mentors and the Strimzi community even after the mentorship.”
Kyverno
My journey within the LFX Mentorship program has led me to exciting challenges spanning Sigstore Cosign updates, Kyverno CLI enhancements, and the formidable task of optimizing the verifyImage operation. The latter, a crucial component in policy application, presented a unique challenge – with every instance of resource deployment, the verification process was needlessly repeated, incurring significant costs. My solution? Enter the game-changing concept of a “verifyImage” cache. Through meticulous benchmarking, Ristretto emerged as the clear victor – a swift and concurrent cache library celebrated for its unwavering commitment to performance and correctness. And the results? Nothing short of astounding. What once consumed 15 seconds now dances to the tune of a few microseconds. This optimization isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about sculpting Kyverno into an unstoppable policy engine, reshaping the landscape of possibility.
Mentee: Amit Kumar (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Shuting Zhao, Vishal Choudhary
“Being a part of the LFX Mentorship program has been a dream come true. Although I wasn’t accepted on my first attempt, I used that setback as motivation to consistently improve my skills and gain valuable experiences. Over the course of three months, I’ve absorbed a wealth of new knowledge and fostered numerous connections within my community, where everyone was remarkably supportive and instrumental in my growth. LFX stands as an invaluable platform, particularly for individuals passionate about cloud technologies and CNCF. Undoubtedly, this mentorship has marked a pivotal and transformative moment in my life journey. I would like to thank the Linux Foundation and CNCF for such an amazing program.”
Knative
Enabling Serverless in Edge environment, Porting Knative to Microshift with two goals
1. Install Knative Serving in Microshift., 2. Run Microshift Serverless in ARM machines.
Mentee: Naveenraj Muthuraj (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Reto Lehmann, Stavros Kontopoulos
“While I started as a stranger to the open-source community, I have grown to become a familiar friend. Thanks to the LFX Mentorship program. It was a very fruitful experience and more importantly, it has equipped me with skills to successfully navigate the open-source ecosystem. Hence, I plan to continue contributing to the knative project and possibly continue the cycle of giving back to the community as an LFX Mentor.”
kubescape
My project was to develop a new image vulnerability patching command for Kubescape. Kubescape already supports scanning images for vulnerabilities. My task was to automate the fixing of these vulnerabilities by developing a new command that patches the image vulnerabilities automatically.
Mentee: Anubhav Gupta (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Craig Box
“In my journey through the LFX Mentorship Program, specifically with CNCF’s Kubescape project, I’ve encountered an incredible learning experience that has profoundly enriched my skills and knowledge. From navigating the selection process to delving into the heart of my assigned tasks, the program has proven to be an immersive growth opportunity. Notably, I’ve expanded my expertise in tackling image vulnerabilities, mastering CVEs, and comprehending SBOMs – a knowledge sphere I was unfamiliar with before the program. The program’s structure compelled me to step beyond my comfort zone and dive into projects like copacetic and grype, fostering an adaptability that has empowered me to contribute to diverse endeavors. Collaborating with mentors and fellow mentees not only honed my technical capabilities but also fostered a sense of friendship and mutual support. The stipend for the effort is a welcomed acknowledgment, but the true reward lies in the invaluable experiences and skills gained. Ultimately, the LFX Mentorship Program, with its holistic approach, serves as a transformative platform for personal and professional growth, offering a profound understanding of open-source contributions and community engagement.”
Thanos
Thanos is an open-source project that provides a scalable solution for monitoring and observability in distributed systems. It extends the capabilities of the Prometheus monitoring system, which is a popular tool used to collect and analyze time-series data and provides additional functionalities for long-term storage, scalability, and global view of monitoring data.
Mentee: Nishchay Veer (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Saswata Mukherjee, Giedrius Statkevičius, Pradyumna Krishna
“My experience with the LFX Mentorship program has been truly transformative. Under my mentor’s expert guidance, I gained a profound understanding of complex technical concepts and honed my skills in a real-world environment. The program not only provided invaluable insights into the open-source community but also fostered a sense of collaboration. The support and knowledge shared by my mentor propelled my growth, and I am now equipped with a newfound confidence to contribute meaningfully to the field. The LFX Mentorship program has been a catalyst for my professional journey, and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity.”
Notary
My project focused on developing content for the Notary documentation and writing blog posts to educate users about the Notary use cases. The main objective was to write user guides with end-to-end scenarios, contributing guides, and developer guides to ensure new developers can easily build and start contributing to Notary subprojects. I was tasked with creating a new documentation directory structure and updating the documentation for the new release of Notation v1.0.0.
Mentee: Roseline Bassey (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Yi Zha
“Participating in the LFX Mentorship program has been a truly rewarding experience for me. Through this program, I had the chance to contribute to the Notary Project’s documentation and receive mentorship from experienced professionals. This experience has not only deepened my technical skills but also honed my communication and collaboration skills through interaction with mentors and the open-source community. This program provided a platform for personal growth, allowing me to contribute meaningfully to a real-world project.”
LitmusChaos
During my LFX Mentorship project, I contributed to the LitmusChaos ecosystem, a critical tool for enhancing cloud-native application reliability. Here are the key components and my contributions:
- Chaos-Exporter: Added unit test cases to Chaos-Exporter, which is essential for monitoring and exporting chaos experiment metrics, ensuring its reliability and effectiveness.
- Chaos-Operator: Upgraded the Operator SDK in Chaos-Operator, a core component responsible for managing the lifecycle of chaos experiments in Kubernetes clusters. This upgrade not only enhanced the Chaos-Operator itself but also ensured compatibility with other LitmusChaos repositories.
- Litmusctl: Worked on upgrading LitmusCtl, a command-line utility that simplifies the orchestration of chaos experiments. This update made LitmusCtl compatible with the latest LitmusChaos release, specifically version 3.0.0-beta9 or later. These updates were particularly important as the new versions involved a redesign, and the chaos-center had been revamped. These updates led to the release of LitmusCtl version 0.23.0.
Mentee: Nagesh Bansal (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Shubham Chaudhary, Saranya Jena, Sarthak Jain, Vansh Bhatia
“My journey in the LFX Mentorship program with LitmusChaos has been an incredible learning experience. Before this, I had limited knowledge about it, but during the program, I had the chance to explore LitmusChaos deeply and understand how it contributes to the robustness of cloud applications in Kubernetes environments. I actively contributed to various LitmusChaos projects, learning through hands-on experience and gaining insights into the challenges of chaos engineering in Kubernetes setups. I owe much of my progress to my supportive mentors who helped me navigate complex challenges and improve my coding skills. Our weekly meetings were crucial for keeping them updated on my progress, discussing ideas, and addressing any roadblocks. Now, I feel confident in my understanding of LitmusChaos and am eager to continue contributing and enhancing it for the community.”
Jaeger
Historically, the Jaeger backend used the OpenTracing API, with Jaeger’s own Go SDK jaeger-client-go, for instrumenting its own internals for distributed tracing. Since Jaeger’s SDKs have been deprecated, it is needed to upgrade the Jaeger backend to use the OpenTelemetry tracing API and SDK directly.
Mentee: Afzal Ansari (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Yuri Shkuro, Albert Teoh
“The mentorship program has been a great experience for me. I got to learn a lot of new things be it cloud native concepts or observability or debugging through code. The amazing thing was that I got supported with one-to-one sessions to work on the production level.”
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