lfx-mentorship – Aniruddha Basak

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.

LFX Mentorship (previously known as Community Bridge) is a platform developed by the Linux Foundation, which promotes and accelerates the adoption, innovation, and sustainability of open-source software.

LFX Mentorship is actively used by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF) as a mentorship platform across the CNCF projects

Program Schedule

2022 — Fall Term — September 1st – Nov 30th

2022 — Summer Term — June 1st – August 31st (My Term)

2022 — Spring Term — March 1st – May 31st

How to Apply

You have to write the Cover Letter and mention all the points about why you are interested in the projects and any previous work you have done or not and what you expect from the project etc.

Tip: Start contributing early and talk to the maintainers about your interests in the program and start to discuss the issue/feature you are going to work on.

My Project

My Project is Cluster API Provider for GCP(CAPG). It is a CNCF Project that helps manage the Kubernetes cluster in the Google Cloud Platform. Currently, another provider Cluster API Provider for AWS(CAPA), Cluster API Provider for Azure(CAPZ) has the support for taking advantage of GPU in their cluster but CAPG doesn’t have so Me and Subhasmita my co-mentee will work on the project to add support for GPU in the CAPG.

My Mentors

Carlos Panato (@cpanato)
Davanum Srinivas (@dims)
Richard Case (@richardcase)

My Co-Mentee

Subhasmita Swain

Well, my journey would be a little monotonous if I didn’t have a co-mentee. It makes my work a little interesting because when we are both stuck on anything we hope on a call and discuss things. Also the weekly work we divide each other and teach each other what we have learned.

How It All Started

I didn’t have any plan to do LFX from the beginning. I started my journey with CAPG for GSoC”22. I applied for the same project and the same feature in the GSoC but that didn’t happen because the project didn’t get selected in the GSoC eventually all the applications to the project got rejected as well. So I talked to the maintainer Richard and told them that can I work in the GPU work as I was very interested in it. He told me that there is still hope in the LFX Mentorship and he opened an application there and I applied there. And then I got selected for the LFX Mentorship 🎉

How It Is Going

I was a little bit worried about how I will work on a big project like this where there are thousands of lines of code and me just a written a project with a max of 500 lines. But I am amazed how the maintainers made my journey very easy and got me onboarded with the introduction to the project for a couple of weeks and gave me small tasks of trying things out and asking a question if I am stuck at any point.