In my previous blog post, I shared how I got selected for the LFX mentorship. In this post, I am going to write about my experience contributing to Cluster API GCP.
Mentorship Project Description
The mentorship was about adding GPU support for CAPG. For Google Cloud Platform it is NVIDIA GPU that it supports as of now. So, We first started with planning our road map about what are the steps that are required for adding the GPU support. The first thing we decided to do is create a GPU driver-enabled OS image that can take advantage of the GPUs in the VM. For that, we created this PR. Here we mostly added packer config files so that it will create the OS image with NVIDIA GPU drivers.
The next thing that we did was to make changes in the CAPG API so that we can declare the fields that are required to create the VMs with GPU in the GCP. After that, we added the validations and webhooks for the new API changes so that incoming requests will be validated properly. Finally, we added the unit tests and end-to-end tests so that we have fully tested software in the main branch. Here is the PR we created in the CAPG repo that has all the changes mentioned above.
And after all our hard work we successfully created VMs with GPU with Cluster API in the GCP.
My experience overall
I never thought of doing LFX and contributing to such big projects a few months back. The only thing that kept me motivated and kept me contributing was the awesome community and the projects. In the beginning, to get familiar with the project, my mentors gave me the task to spin a normal Kubernetes managed cluster in the GCP using Cluster API and reading the documentation. Throughout the mentorship, all my mentors Dims, Richard, and Carlos helped me overcome all kinds of challenges to complete the task, and also they gave me the motivation and enthusiasm to push my boundaries and learn new things every day. This mentorship not only helped me to become a better developer in the Cloud Native technologies but also helped me a better thinker in terms of solving real-world engineering problems. In one word my overall experience with LFX mentorship is fabulous and wonderful. And last but not least all of the above would have been incomplete if I didn’t have my co-mentee Subhasmita.
Future Scope
After this project, I started taking other open source issues in the CAPG and also started contributing to CAPI as well. And I will keep contributing to the CNCF project in the future and hopefully, I will work on more such big and significant features in the future.
Becoming Kubernetes & Kubernetes SIG member
Another great thing that happened to me was that I recently became Kubernetes, Kubernetes-SIG member. Thanks to Carlos, Nabarun, Richard, Dims for giving me +1
Also, if you have any queries regarding Cluster API GCP or Cluster API, feel free to join the Kubernetes slack using the link: https://slack.k8s.io/ and then join the #cluster-api-gcp #cluster-api channel. And, also feel free to ping me @aniruddha on slack if you have any questions.
Aniruddha Basak 