Mentorship blog by Nate Waddington, Head of Mentorship & Documentation at CNCF

We are thrilled to share that 45 CNCF mentees with the LFX Program have successfully completed their mentorship.    

Numerous CNCF projects across Graduated, Incubating, Sandbox projects, and TAGs (Technical Advisory Groups) got involved, providing our mentees with invaluable experience within the open source and cloud native ecosystem. Projects involved include Harbor, Jaeger, Kubescape, KubeEdge, Kubernetes, Meshery, TAG Network, Vitess, TUF, Thanos, and many more! 

Additional details on the CNCF projects, mentors, and students who successfully completed the program can be found below and on GitHub

Intern profile highlights

KWOK

KWOK is a Kubernetes sub-project; people often refer to these sub-projects as Kubernetes Special Interest Group (SIG) projects. It allows developers to simulate large clusters with hundreds of nodes and pods that consume little resources. It uses real Kubernetes components but operates without a Kubelet.

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Mentee: Charles Uneze (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Zhenghao Zhu and Shiming Zhang

“The LFX Mentorship program broadened my understanding of Kubernetes and how other cloud-native projects test the Kubernetes control plane or their custom control plane using a project like KWOK. While studying the CKA topics, I only knew about the Kubernetes control plane. I also understood how to actively collaborate using Git. I encourage others who’d like to break into the cloud-native industry to leverage the LFX mentorship program to get hands-on experience, you won’t regret it.”

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NCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

Enhancing the Kafka integration within Jaeger V2, a leading distributed tracing platform. 

Mentee: Harshith Mente (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Yuri Shkuro, Jonah Kowall, and Yash Sharma

“My experience with the LFX Mentorship program has been incredibly rewarding and transformative.The opportunity to work on a real-world project with the Jaeger community not only expanded my technical skills but also deepened my understanding of open-source collaboration. The mentorship from industry experts like Yuri Shkuro, Jonah Kowall, and Yash Sharma was invaluable, providing guidance and insights that greatly enhanced my learning journey. This program has given me the confidence to tackle complex challenges and the motivation to continue contributing to the open-source ecosystem. I’m immensely grateful for this experience and look forward to applying what I’ve learned in future endeavors.”

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CNCF – JaegerProject

Implementing a unified telemetry container for both V1 and V2 components of Jaeger. 

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Mentee: Saransh Shankar (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Yuri Shkuro, Jonah Kowall, and Yash Sharma

“The guidance I received from my mentor Yuri Shkuro and the Jaeger community was invaluable. They were always ready to assist, providing feedback and sharing their extensive knowledge of the field. This collaborative environment not only facilitated my learning but also boosted my confidence as a developer. I gained insights into best practices for coding, debugging, and collaborating in a distributed team setting, all of which are crucial for a successful career in DevOps and open-source development.”

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Meshery

Enhancing Meshery’s design capabilities by implementing support for versioning Meshery designs. 

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Mentee: Saurabh Kumar Singh (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Lee Calcote and Uzair Shaikh

“My experience with the LFX Mentorship program was incredibly rewarding, offering me invaluable exposure to the cloud-native ecosystem and tools. Through this mentorship, I was able to develop and enhance a wide range of technical skills that are essential for a career in the software industry. The hands-on experience with real-world projects, such as contributing to Meshery, significantly boosted my confidence and prepared me for future career opportunities. Additionally, the stipend provided by the program was a great support, further motivating me to excel and pursue my career goals with greater determination. Overall, the LFX Mentorship program has been a pivotal experience in my professional development.”

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KCL

This project aims to support more features of the IDE in the tree-sitter-kcl, adding the entire syntax of KCL so that the parser can pass all the test integrations. The primary motive is the addition of all the syntax present in KCL docs, which will, in turn, help the developers in their productivity and enhance the code quality by implementing extensive test cases and robust error handling.

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Mentee: Korada Vishal (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Zheng Zhang and Zong Zhe

“My mentors and the KCL project are very good. I had wanted to work with projects where I could learn a lot about the new upcoming technologies and I did learn about web3, Rust, and KCL by building small projects related to it. I will continue contributing to KCL-lang after completion.”

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Prometheus

Prometheus has a “Remote Write” feature that allows the metrics it collects to be sent to other time series databases. In Remote Write 2.0, the implementation and wire format will significantly change to improve transmission efficiency. My task was to extend Prometheus’ benchmarking tool, Prombench to support the new feature.

Mentee: Moeka Mishima (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Jesús Vázquez and Callum Styan

“The LFX Mentorship Program was a significant milestone for me. Contributing to Prometheus, a crucial open-source project, and acquiring new skills has been a significant boost to my career. I intend to continue working on this project and leverage what I’ve learned to collaborate with more developers and contribute to the growth of the open-source community.”

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Litmus

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Mentee: Dahyeon Kang (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Vedant Shrotria, Sayan Mondal, and Raj Babu Das

“I have gained a lot from the LFX Mentorship, not only in open source, but also in English, communication skills (such as communicating my opinions), and meaningful contributions. This experience will help me grow in the future, both technically and professionally.”

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CNCF KubeEdge

Enhancing and improving the test coverage for KubeEdge by adding Unit and End-to-endEnd to End tests for the project. I also migrated the tests from the standardfrom standard library to a new assertion library and wrotewritten multiple blogs for KubeEdge releases.

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Mentee: Shubham Singh (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Fisher Xu and Shelley Bao

“The 3 months of LFX mentorship was one of the best learning experiences I ever had in tech. In these 3 months, I explored how to use KubeEdge, worked with my mentors to improve test coverage of the project as well as contributed to the documentation. I am really grateful that I got to work on an emerging CNCF project with such experienced engineers as my mentors. Working closely with such great engineers has taught me a lot about cloud native application development, testing, and a lot more. I am thankful to the Linux Foundation for conducting such an amazing open source program and doing it consistently over the years and I highly recommend to at least apply for LFX if you are a student or somebody interested in FOSS, even the application process and contributions will teach you a lot about FOSS development.”

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Kubespray

Adding new features (such as Gateway API installation), fixing CI issues (like CentOS 7 EOL), and updating application versions (including OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager and Cert Manager).

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Mentee: ChengHao Yang (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Kai Yan and Mohamed Zaian

“Participating in the LFX Mentorship program has provided me with invaluable growth opportunities. First and foremost, I would like to thank my mentors, Kai Yan and Mohamed Zaian, as well as other maintainers like Antoine Legrand, for giving me the freedom to explore my ideas and for offering guidance on how to fix the CI of different branches at the right moments. Collaborating with such experts in the open-source community has been a great honor. In addition to gaining hands-on experience, I have broadened my technical horizons and feel confident about my future career plans. Although this Mentorship has ended, my contributions will not stop here. I will continue to dedicate my efforts to maintaining Kubespray in the future.”

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Litmus

Integrating an upgrading agent into Litmus 3.x streamlining Chaoscenter upgrades, eliminating the need for fresh installations. This feature ensures seamless transitions between versions, which is especially useful when facing significant changes.

Mentee: Kartikay (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Sarthak Jain and Saranya Jena

“The LFX Mentorship was an amazing, transformative journey that equipped me with better industry practices and helped me upskill to become a confident contributor to the open-source ecosystem. The mentorship also enabled me to learn and grow with the knowledge of experienced developers while contributing to a large-scale codebase and enhancing my technical skills, particularly in Golang. Thank you so much for this initiative!”

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KubeArmor

The project aimed to improve the system test coverage of KubeArmor and add tests for host protection in various modes. These tests were written using the Ginkgo framework and automated via GitHub workflows.

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Mentee: Navin Chandra  (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Barun Acharya and Rudraksh Pareek

“The LFX Mentorship program was very impactful for my career. From learning new concepts in runtime security like eBPF and LSMs to enhancing my previous skills in golang, GitHub actions and Kubernetes, it was great learning experience for me.”

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Knative

Improving the onboarding experience for new users of Knative Eventing. Through a combination of user research, surveys, and in-depth interviews, the project identified key pain points that users face when first interacting with Knative Eventing.

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Mentee: Firat Bezir (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Leo Li and Mariana Mejia

“The LFX Mentorship program has been an incredibly rewarding experience, offering me the opportunity to work on a real-world open-source project while learning from industry experts. Throughout the mentorship, I gained hands-on experience with Knative Eventing, deepened my understanding of event-driven architectures, and improved my skills in user research and documentation. The supportive and collaborative environment fostered by my mentors and the broader community made the journey both educational and enjoyable. This experience has not only strengthened my technical skills but also my confidence in contributing to the open-source ecosystem. I am grateful for the chance to contribute to CNCF and look forward to future contributions.”

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Vitess

Arewefastyet is a benchmarking system for Vitess.

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Mentee: Jad Chahed (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Florent Poinsard

“Incredible experience!”

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Crossplane

Improving the developer experience of the Crossplane users. We used and analyzed the tooling that is being used by the developers so that we can create a better experience. My focus was mostly on the beta validate command. We added very important and helpful features to the command and improved its overall performance. After this mentorship, the beta validate command’s execution times went from 50-60 seconds (uncached) to 10-20 seconds (uncached) and from 2-3 seconds (cached) to 500-800ms (cached). We also added features like unknown field validation to the tool.

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Mentee: Mehmet Enes (Personal blog post about mentorship experience) 

Mentors: Jared Watts and Ezgi Demireal

“I want to thank my mentors for their kindness and help throughout the mentorship. This mentorship was a great source of self motivation and high quality technical insight for me. At some times I really felt lost and thought “I don’t even understand how things work, and how am I going to contribute??” But my mentors’ guidance made me learn so much on golang and Crossplane. In a very short time I learned how to look at the software as a source of user experience and I feel this greatly improved my perspective on software development. My overall experience with the Crossplane community was great and this mentorship made it perfect thanks so much for everything!”

Full list of successful mentees

Mentoring ProjectMentor(s)Mentee
CNCF – WasmEdge: Finetune LLM models for Rust coding assistanceMichael Yuan, Hung-Ying TaiAkshat Shrivastava
CNCF – KCL: KCL Package Management Dependencies Sparse CheckoutZhe Zong, Pengfei XuAsish Kumar
CNCF – Harbor: Harbor CLIVadim Bauer, Yan Wang, Orlin VasilevBishal Das
CNCF – KWOK: Enhancement of Technical OutcomesShiming Zhang, Zhenghao ZhuCharles Uneze
CNCF – KubeEdge: Iterating Enhancement for KubeEdge DashboardHongbing Zhang, Shelley BaoChen Su
CNCF – Kubernetes SIG Project Kubespray: bug fixes & enhance helm support for add-onsKay Yan, Mohamed ZaianCheng Hao Yang
CNCF – Copacetic: Add new scenarios to Copa’s existing image patching featuresAshna Mehrotra, Robert KieltyCynthia Toporowski
CNCF – LitmusChaos: Revamp Litmus Helm Agent, UBI migration of ImagesSayan Mondal, Vedant Shrotria, Raj Babu DasDahyeon Kang
CNCF – in-toto: Documentation Boost!Justin Cappos, Patrice Chalin, Lukas PühringerDariksha Ansari
CNCF – TAG Network: Technical Content Creation CNCF ChallengesLee Calcote, Nic JacksonEmeka Ama
CNCF – Crossplane: Make Crossplane Easy – Improving the Developer ExperienceJared Watts, Ezgi DemirelEnes Onuş
CNCF – Knative: Improve Knative Eventing OnboardingLeo Li , Mariana MejiaFırat Bezir
CNCF – Jaeger: Jaeger-V2 Kafka-based architectureYuri Shkuro, Jonah Kowall, Yash SharmaHarshith Mente
CNCF – Service Mesh Performance: Convergence of Network and Graph topologiesLee Calcote, Xin HuangIram Sofi
CNCF – Vitess: Improve the website of our automated-benchmarking tool (migrate to shadcn ui and typescript)Florent Poinsard , Frances ThaiJad Chahed
CNCF – LitmusChaos: Enhancements in Chaoscenter: GitOps Support for Azure Git, Group Chaos Infra by Environments in Infrastructure Selection ModalShubham Chaudhary, Amit Das, Sahil KumarJanhavi Alekar
CNCF – Kubescape: Advanced Kubescape plugin features for VSCodeBen Hirschberg , David WertenteilJayant Pranjal
CNCF – in-toto: Sigstore support for in-toto-jenkinsSantiago Torres-Arias, Pradyumna KrishnaJyothi Kiran Satya Raju Jamy
CNCF – LitmusChaos: Implementing Upgrade Agent Support in Litmus 3.xSaranya Jena, Sarthak JainKartikay Kartikay
CNCF – Vitess: Community building and engagementDeepthi Sigireddi, Florent PoinsardKirtan Chandak
CNCF – KCL: Supports tree-sitter for KCLZheng Zhang, Zhe ZongKorada Vishal
CNCF – Kubescape: Backstage plugin that adheres to the new plugin systemRotem Refael , Matthias BertschyLeo Yang
CNCF – KubeEdge: KubeEdge Documentation Improvementzhiying , wbc6080Mingdi Xue
CNCF – Prometheus: Prometheus Remote Write Benchmarking CapabilitiesCallum Styan, Jesús VázquezMoeka Mishima
CNCF – KubeArmor: Improve System Test Coverage and Pratices for KubeArmorBarun Acharya, Rudraksh Pareek, Anurag Kumar, Prashant MishraNavin Chandra
CNCF – KWOK: Enhancement of Test CasesShiming Zhang, Zhenghao ZhuNeeraj Nagure
CNCF – Harbor: Harbor SatelliteVadim Bauer, Yan Wang, Orlin VasilevPrasanth B
CNCF – Jaeger: Jaeger-V2 Service Performance MonitoringYuri Shkuro, Jonah Kowall, Yash SharmaRaghuram Kannan
CNCF – Meshery: Project tutorials, design patterns, & publish reference architecturesYash Sharma, Lee CalcoteRishab Sharma
CNCF – Meshery: End-to-End Testing with PlaywrightAabid Sofi, Lee CalcoteRudraksh Tyagi
CNCF – OpenKruise: Enhancement for Kruise-Game DashboardQiuyang Liu, Zhongwei LiuSahil Gupta
CNCF – TUF: Documentation assessment and improvementsJustin Cappos, Patrice Chalin, Lukas PühringerSandra Dindi
CNCF – Jaeger: Jaeger-V2 Observability and HealthchecksYuri Shkuro, Jonah Kowall, Yash SharmaSaransh Shankar
CNCF – Meshery: Support versioning for Meshery designsLee Calcote, Uzair ShaikhSaurabh Singh
CNCF – Knative: Applying pre-prepared website designAli Ok, Calum Murray, Zainab Husainshravani kaware
CNCF – KCL: Optimization of KCL LSP prompt informationPengfei Xu, Zheng ZhangShruti Sharma
CNCF – Thanos Compactor: Display TODO plan in UIMichael Hoffmann , Saswata MukherjeeShu Guan
CNCF – KubeEdge: KubeEdge test cases enhancementFisher Xu, Shelley BaoShubham Singh
CNCF – TAG Network: Mapping CNCF Landscape one Relationship-at-a-timeLee Calcote, Uzair ShaikhShubham Upadhyay
CNCF – WasmEdge: Create a search-enabled API server for local LLMsMichael Yuan, Hung-Ying TaiSuryansh Arya
CNCF – Prometheus: Mark Out-of-order ingestion as stableBryan Boreham, Jesús VázquezVanshika Vanshika
CNCF – in-toto: Add GUAC supportSantiago Torres-Arias, Pradyumna KrishnaYashveer
CNCF – Karmada: Certificate Lifecycle ManagementHongcai Ren, Zhen ChangYing Zhang
CNCF – WasmEdge: Support piper as a new backend of the WASI-NN WasmEdge pluginHung-Ying Tai, dm4YU, SHAO-YU
CNCF – KubeEdge: Router Manager Support HAShelley Bao , jiaweizhijia yang