Summary of LFX’22 Spring Mentorship with KubEdge

I am a junior year undergrad pursuing my Bachelors of Technology in Information Technology from India. I’m an open source enthusiast who is passionate about technology and that’s what made me apply for the CNCF LFX Mentorship in Spring’22.

About LFX

LFX Mentorship is a platform developed by Linux Foundation which accelerates the adoption, innovation and sustainability of open source software. The program is actively used by CNCF as a platform across CNCF projects.

The program usually runs three times in a year:

• Spring Term from March 1st to May 31st
• Summer Term from June 1st to August 31st
• Fall Term from September 1st to November 30th

Application Process

I got to know about the LFX Mentorship program while attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 virtually. I then had a conversation with a few past mentees who told me about how they had a wonderful learning experience and how the mentorship kickstarted their contribution to open source. I then applied for the program in the following Spring Term.

I started browsing the projects and shortlisted a few of them based upon my tech stacks. Candidates as a part of the application process are required to provide cover letters and resumes while applying, so mentors may review them. In addition, mentors may also interview the candidates to understand their level of qualification before making the final decision.

Start contributing to the project and interact with the mentors prior to the mentorship begins as it adds a plus point in your application process.

Once you are all done, wait for the good news to drop in your email!

After Selection

My journey started on March 1st. I started exploring the KubeEdge docs and spent time understanding the project’s codebase. I connected with my mentor, Fisher Xu in Slack and started communicating with him. My task was to update the docs and fix minor issues in the KubeEdge website.

To complete my tasks, I had to learn and use Hugo and KubeEdge. It was, however, a great experience to use and learn them.

I opened pull requests in the KubeEdge website repo fixing some bugs and documentation updates.

About my project: KubeEdge

KubeEdge is the first open source project in the field of edge computing with production environment deployment capability. It is an open source system for extending native containerized application orchestration capabilities to hosts at Edge.It is built upon kubernetes and provides fundamental infrastructure support for network, application deployment and metadata synchronization between cloud and edge. The goal of the project is to make an open platform to enable Edge computing, extending native containerized application orchestration capabilities to hosts at Edge, which is built upon kubernetes and provides fundamental infrastructure support for network, app deployment and metadata synchronization between cloud and edge.

The advantages of KubeEdge include:

• Edge Computing- With business logic running at the Edge, much larger volumes of data can be secured & processed locally where the data is produced. This reduces the network bandwidth requirements and consumption between Edge and Cloud. This increases responsiveness, decreases costs, and protects customers’ data privacy.
• Simplified development- Developers can write regular HTTP or MQTT based applications, containerize these, and run them anywhere — either at the Edge or in the Cloud — whichever is more appropriate.
• Kubernetes-native support- With KubeEdge, users can orchestrate apps, manage devices and monitor app and device status on Edge nodes just like a traditional Kubernetes cluster in the Cloud.
• Abundant applications- It is easy to get and deploy existing complicated machine learning, image recognition, event processing and other high-level applications to the Edge.

KubeEdge project has proven to be invaluable in terms of providing a complete cloud vendor-neutral, lightweight, heterogeneous edge computing platform.

My Experience

The journey was quite fruitful. These 3 months were full of learning new things, figuring out stuff, reading documentation and tackling unexpected obstacles that came along the way. Learning about KubeEdge was fun.

I even gotta know how these Open Source organizations like Linux Foundation work and build these projects which are impacting billions of lives. This opportunity helped me become a better communicator, timezone friendly and a better open-source contributor. It made me realize that Open Source is more than just code ,it’s about community.

And that’s a wrap, what an amazing journey it has been!