Congratulations to CNCF’s 2024 Term 1 (March – May) LFX Program mentees who have finished the program successfully! Following a three-month program working with 28 different Graduated, Incubating, and Sandbox projects, including Antrea, Istio, KubeEdge, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus + many more!
Additional details on the CNCF projects, mentors, and mentees who successfully completed the program can be found below and on our website.
Mentee profile highlights
Antrea
My project is to streamline Antrea’s installation process. Therefore, I have set up two frameworks that conduct Pre-installation and Post-installation connectivity checks of a cluster. This reduces manual checks to ensure everything runs as expected and warns the user of any problems.
Mentee: Kanha Gupta (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Antonin Bas, Quan Tian and Lan Luo
“My experience in this Mentorship has been absolutely fantastic. My mentors were very helpful and patient with me throughout and I learned a lot through this program. Overall, I see this program as one of the best in open source.”
Antrea
During my LFX Mentorship with CNCF’s Antrea project, I developed an East-West connectivity monitoring tool that enhances the Antrea Kubernetes network plugin. Antrea is tasked with providing robust networking for Kubernetes Pods across varied nodes and geographical locations. My project involved creating a built-in tool capable of monitoring and reporting the network health and average latency between any two nodes in a Kubernetes cluster. This new functionality was realized by introducing a custom API in Antrea to gather and relay network latency data. Additionally, we aimed to extend the Antrea web UI to include a heatmap visualization of latency metrics, facilitating easier access and understanding of network health across the cluster.
Mentee: Bo Lv
Mentors: Antonin Bas & Yang Ding & Anlan He
“The LFX Mentorship program provided an invaluable experience, particularly through the opportunity to contribute to the CNCF’s Antrea project. Working under the guidance of expert mentors, I gained profound insights into network functionalities within Kubernetes, which deepened my understanding and skills in network engineering and software development. The collaborative environment fostered by the mentorship allowed me to significantly refine my technical abilities and learn new techniques in real-world applications. The project not only enhanced my professional growth but also contributed meaningfully to the open-source community by improving Kubernetes networking observability, I will continue to support open source project!”
Inspektor Gadget
Inspektor Gadget is a framework for debugging and inspecting Kubernetes resources and applications. My project primarily focuses on enabling support for Uprobe and USDT tracepoints in Inspektor Gadget. Additionally, I have ported several gadgets to monitor SSL encryption and decryption, detect memory leaks, and observe garbage collection.
Mentee: Tianyi Liu
Mentors: Alban Crequy, Mauricio Vásquez Bernal
“I gained a lot from my journey in the LFX Mentorship program with Inspektor Gadget. During the three months, I became familiar with the use cases and technical details of the Inspektor Gadget project, accumulated extensive experience with eBPF, and did exciting work on an independent module. Throughout this mentorship, I often discussed design and technical details with my mentor, which greatly expanded my horizons. We delved into the Linux source code and pioneered solutions to many challenging problems. I not only received enthusiastic guidance from my mentors but also had the opportunity to connect with many others in the CNCF community. I plan to stay involved in the Inspektor Gadget community after the mentorship and continue creating value for more users.”
Inspektor Gadget
We designed a testing framework to verify the functionality of Image-based gadgets which are either Inspektor Gadget’s or custom gadgets made by the user. This testing framework advances Inspektor Gadget’s goal of providing a framework for building, packaging, and running gadgets, one step closer by allowing users to implement tests for their gadgets with ease.
Mentee: Pranav Pawar
Mentors: Alban Crequy
“I gained a lot from my journey in the LFX Mentorship program with Inspektor Gadget.
During the three months, I became familiar with the use cases and technical details of the Inspektor Gadget project. Throughout this mentorship, I often discussed design and technical details with my mentors, which enabled me to design a better testing framework. I also had the opportunity to connect with many others in the CNCF community. I plan to stay involved in the Inspektor Gadget community after the mentorship and continue creating value for more users.”
Istio
During my LFX Mentorship program, I collaborated with mentors from Istio to enhance test coverage for Istio’s Ambient Mesh. Our mission was to ensure the reliability and robustness of the mesh through comprehensive testing.
Mentee: Adil Mohamed M P
Mentors: Faseela K, Zhonghu Xu
“All through my journey with computers so far, I assumed that once I start working I will be either a developer or a tester or a technical writer. That whole misconception was wiped off by this mentorship program which was the most exciting part for me. I was hired to improve only the integration tests for Ambient Mesh, as the feature was getting promoted to Beta in the last Istio 1.22 release. I was happy that I could make my contributions to the release, but even happier that the contribution which started with developing integration tests, soon expanded to writing some documentation for the new ambient features as well. I then wrote tests for the documentation too, and towards the end I could raise issues which I discovered during the testing and started fixing them myself! My mentors never under estimated my skills, and they involved me in all the discussions, and tagged me on github wherever I could be of use. I was really happy when people were thanking me for the issues I discovered, and I could see that some of the issues were immediately fixed too. I was super delighted when my name also showed up in the change notes of Istio’s latest and greatest 1.22 release.”
Jaeger
The project focused on Jaeger V2, a significant new version that rebases all Jaeger backend components (agent, collector, ingester, and query) on top of the OpenTelemetry Collector. In Jaeger V2, we integrated the storage backends (Cassandra, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Badger, gRPC) supported by the current Jaeger version. We wrote integration tests for these storage systems.
Mentee: Harshvir Potpose (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Yuri Shkuro
“It was thrilling and exciting to embark on this journey! Now, as I graduate from the LFX Mentorship program and write this blog, I can say the experience was wonderful—everything I expected and even more over the past three months. I am deeply grateful to my mentor, Yuri Shkuro, for his incredible support throughout the project. Heartfelt thanks to the entire Jaeger Maintainers Team, LFX, and the CNCF community, without whom neither this project nor the program would have been possible.”
Knative Eventing
In a multi-tenant scenario, some use cases might require separating brokers and channels in different namespaces than the services they send events to. While this setup would work if the team consuming the events had access to the namespaces where brokers and channels are, this is not always the case. To address this issue, a new feature was proposed for triggers and subscriptions (event links) to exist in a different namespace from the broker or channel they reference. The LFX Mentorship Program allowed me to bring this novel and highly requested feature into reality. I used Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to manage permissions securely for the specific implementation. A new RBAC verb, “knsubscribe”, was created to allow users to subscribe to a particular broker/channel. In addition, I used Subject Access Reviews to ensure only authorized users could create and manage these cross-namespace event links, further enhancing security within the Knative Eventing framework. Following the new changes, the control plane and data plane were adjusted accordingly to enable the smooth execution of the feature. Unit tests were created to ensure the feature works as expected. An E2E test is currently underway to confirm event delivery between the resources. All the changes were placed behind a feature flag, allowing users to enable/disable this feature as desired.
Mentee: Yijie Wang
Mentors: Calum Murray and Pierangelo Di Pilato
“This mentorship experience has been profoundly transformative and rewarding for me. The program has not only helped strengthen my programming skills, but also deepened my understanding of the considerations behind design decisions. My mentors, Calum and Pierangelo, have been instrumental in my growth throughout this experience. They provided not only technical guidance on the feature’s implementation, but also explained the rationale behind them, enhancing my understanding of event-driven architectures. The weekly meet-ups and check-ins in the Knative Eventing channel allowed me to approach the project in a structured way, starting off with small, manageable tasks to larger and more complex work. Reflecting on the overall experience, this journey was marked by a mix of challenges and triumphs. There were definitely moments of frustration, such as debugging test cases or fixing incorrect commits. However, these moments were far outweighed by the sense of accomplishment when I merged a pull request or finally spotted the problematic line of code. I’m really grateful to be a mentee in the program and it was an experience I’ll never forget.”
Knative
My project focused on enhancing the contributor experience within Knative. I conducted comprehensive research to identify challenges faced by contributors and maintainers, analyze the reasons behind contributor disengagement, and propose actionable recommendations to encourage sustained engagement. This involved conducting one-on-one interviews (with contributors and maintainers), analyzing data to uncover key themes, and formulating strategies to improve onboarding, issue labeling, community engagement, and feedback mechanisms. The goal of these actionable recommendations is not only to enhance the developer experience for everyone involved in Knative but also to strengthen the bonds that unite us as a community!
Mentee: Prajjwal Yadav (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Calum Murray & Mariana Mejía
“Reflecting on this LFX mentorship opportunity, I’ve gained invaluable insights into open-source collaboration, community dynamics, and the importance of putting developer experience first. The engagement with the Knative community throughout this mentorship has been particularly rewarding, and I am sincerely thankful to my mentors and all who contributed to my research project. This experience has definitely strengthened my dedication to open-source development and community engagement, and I eagerly anticipate continuing my involvement with Knative!”
KubeArmor
My LFX project involved creating support for KubeArmor in Kata Containers. Kata Containers provide a runtime that spins up lightweight virtual machines (VMs) instead of traditional containers, offering an environment that feels and behaves like containers but with enhanced isolation. This isolation helps prevent attackers from compromising the host system, even if they manage to gain elevated privileges within a container and attempt to escape.
Mentee: Rishabh Soni (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Barun Acharya, Rudraksh Pareek, Prashant Mishra
“My LFX experience was nothing short of excellent, thanks to my mentors Barun, Rudraksh, and Prashant. They made my mentorship journey highly collaborative and supportive. Whenever I faced seemingly insurmountable challenges, my mentors guided me through the obstacles and kept me moving forward.
LFX holds special significance for me as it led to my first job interview, which I successfully cleared. I am incredibly grateful to my mentors for selecting me for this unique project. Developing runtime security support for Kata Containers is a valuable feature that enhances workload protection against unwanted executions by attackers.
Additionally, a notable aspect of my project involved collaborating with another LFX mentee working on a technology crucial to our development process within KubeArmor. This collaboration was unique and highly enjoyable.
Overall, LFX has been the best mentorship experience I’ve had, and I am profoundly thankful for it.”
KubeArmor
The motivation behind the project was to build an application behavior dashboard that displays application behavior in a Grafana dashboard. After testing several existing plugins without satisfactory results, we created a new Grafana plugin specifically for KubeArmor. I implemented functionality to show two dashboards: a process graph illustrating the relationships between processes, particularly those created by users, and a network graph displaying the communication between pods and services within a Kubernetes cluster. This project provided a comprehensive understanding of how to effectively visualize application behavior using Grafana and KubeArmor.
Mentee: Hari Sudarsan
Mentors: Barun Acharya, Rudraksh Pareek, Prashant Mishra, Anurag Kumar
“The LFX Mentorship program was a great experience for me to learn about Kubernetes and Observability. The mentors were really supportive and kind, ensuring there was no friction between mentees and mentors. I learned a lot about Grafana and KubeArmor, and made connections with many great people. Overall, the LFX Mentorship was an excellent learning experience and an opportunity to build valuable connections.”
KubeArmor
KubeArmor is a runtime security enforcer that restricts pod behavior. It utilizes a container runtime UNIX socket to poll new containers continuously. The project aims to change KubeArmor’s model from a polling model to an event-driven model by utilizing OCI hooks. This eliminates the need for using container runtime sockets and eliminates the time between containers starting and KubeArmor monitoring them.
Mentee: Abdulrahman Elawady (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Barun Acharya, Rudraksh Pareek, Akshay Gaikwad
“It was a really fun experience. I got to be in a very welcoming community that helps and encourages new people. It was filled with knowledge and new experiences and it’s a great entry for open source. I really enjoyed this mentorship!”
KubeEdge
“Keink (KubeEdge IN kind) is a project for running local KubeEdge clusters using Docker container “nodes”, so developers can install a multi-node edge clusters in one node. I supported the latest version (1.17 KubeEdge) installation in keink in this project.”
Mentee: Zhiyuan Gao
Mentors: Hongbing Zhang & Fisher Xu
“Participating in the LFX Mentorship program has been an incredibly valuable experience that has broadened my technical horizons and enhanced my practical skills. Throughout this journey, I had the opportunity to directly interact with experts in the open-source industry, receiving invaluable guidance and advice. Additionally, I participated in open-source projects, learning advanced development tools and methodologies, which significantly improved my teamwork and problem-solving abilities. The entire program provided a platform for me to showcase myself and grow, filling me with confidence for my future career. I am deeply grateful to CNCF for offering this opportunity and hope that more people will join this exciting community.”
KubeEdge
In the latest release, KubeEdge has implemented the ability to pre-pull images. However, each task execution currently only supports images from the same image repository. We will enhance this feature to support capabilities like overriding images and secrets, and complete end-to-end tests for it.
Mentee: Yanpiao Han
Mentors: Yue Bao
“I had a very enjoyable time participating in the LFX Mentorship Program. This project provided me with a unique opportunity to work closely with experienced mentors and explore and learn together. I am very grateful to the project team’s organization and management, as well as my mentor for their valuable advice and guidance. I believe these experiences will have a profound impact on my future career development.”
Kyverno
My work during the mentorship was to convert Kyverno validate policies to CEL policies. As a result, the Kyverno policy library now includes numerous examples of how to write CEL policies. Kubernetes had added support for validating resources directly in the API server with the help of ValidatingAdmissionPolicy which makes use of CEL language. Kyverno has a native syntax to perform validations on resources and it also has added support for CEL. Users can now write CEL policies, and also optionally generate ValidatingAdmissionPolicies from them.
Mentee: Chandan D K (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Mariam Fahmy, Anusha Hegde
“The learning experience I had over the last 3 months will prove to be helpful throughout my career. Going through documentation, looking for references, testing things out etc are some skills that I was able to improve during this mentorship. The opportunity to contribute to a real world project as a student feels amazing. The support from my mentors Mariam Fahmy and Anusha Hegde made the mentorship experience productive and fulfilling. Also, thanks to the Kyverno community that helped me make my contributions possible.”
Kyverno
In Kyverno 1.11, support for conditions in every attestation entry was introduced. However, there was a limitation where the payload in one attestation couldn’t be used while verifying another signed attestation. This project aims to resolve this issue, enabling more flexible and robust attestation verification workflows. The proposed solution in this project enhances Kyverno’s attestation verification by enabling the use of payloads from one attestation during the verification of another signed attestation. Allowing cross-referencing of attestation payloads ensures more robust and interconnected security checks. This improvement is demonstrated with practical examples, showing both successful and failed validation cases based on specific conditions, thereby validating the effectiveness and reliability of the new feature.
Mentee: D N Siva Sathyaseelan (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Shuting Zhao and Vishal Choudhary
“Participating in the LFX Mentorship program has been a truly rewarding experience for me. I’m really grateful to my mentors Shuting Zhao and Vishal Choudhary for helping me throughout the project! I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Kyverno, LFX, and CNCF communities. Without their support, neither this project nor this program would have been possible. 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
For my LFX Mentorship project, I focused on enhancing the LitmusChaos project by implementing a multiple project owner feature and integrating the EFK (Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana) logging stack to create a log download API. Initially, my task was to enable multiple project owners within LitmusChaos, ensuring better collaboration and project management. As the project evolved, I expanded my scope to include optimizations in the user interface and the development of a comprehensive project management section. Additionally, I integrated the EFK stack, facilitating robust logging capabilities and creating an API for downloading logs, thereby improving the users’ observability and debugging experience.
Mentee: Aryan Bhokare (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Saranya Jena, Hrishav Jha, Sahil Kumar
“My experience with the LFX Mentorship program has been profoundly transformative and immensely rewarding. Over the past 12 weeks, I transitioned from being a novice in the open-source community to a confident contributor, working on the LitmusChaos project. The support and guidance from my mentors, Hrishav Jha, Saranya Jena, and Sahil Kumar, were invaluable, helping me navigate initial challenges and steadily progress in my tasks. This journey has significantly enhanced my technical skills, particularly in Golang and frontend development, while also fostering a deeper understanding of collaborative open-source practices. The mentorship program has not only enriched my professional development but has also instilled a strong sense of perseverance and continuous learning.”
Meshery
Meshery is a platform for the collaborative design and operation of cloud and cloud native infrastructure and application. It supports all Kubernetes based infrastructure, and also contains multiple extensions that enable it to operate efficiently.
Mentee: Rex Joshua Ibegbu
Mentors: Lee Calcote
“This mentorship program has been a huge avenue for me to learn more about cloud infrastructure, the processes involved in its operation and how it effectively provides solutions to multiple products and solutions that make use of its features. I have also improved my understanding of designer-developer workflows and how to collaborate more effectively with engineers and developers to deliver features & solutions that enhance the way users experience a solution.”
OpenTelemetry
One logging bridge per language
Mentee: Khushi Jain (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Juraci Paixao, Andrzej Stencel
“My journey with OpenTelemetry has been transformative. I have enjoyed every aspect, from engaging with Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to spending quiet moments brainstorming solutions. This experience embodies the kind of engineering I have always aspired to do. Aside from that, the review process can sometimes be slow to ensure good coding practices and code quality but it’s not something to be deterred by.”
Prometheus
As an LFX mentee, I contributed to the Prometheus `client_golang` project, focusing on enhancing CI/CD pipelines and automation. This project is essential for metrics instrumentation in Go applications. My work primarily involved automating Go version upgrades, autogenerating Go files for runtime metrics collection, and streamlining changelog generation for new releases. Initially, navigating the open-source landscape was overwhelming, but with the right resources and guidance, it became an exciting adventure.
Mentee: Sachin Sahu (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Kemal Akkoyun, Arthur Silva Sens
“The LFX Mentorship program was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience that provided invaluable knowledge from experienced developers and introduced me to a supportive open-source community. The mentorship fulfilled my wish to contribute to open source and taught me the value of persistence and continuous learning. Despite initial struggles, the sense of achievement from contributing to a large-scale project was immensely rewarding, leaving me more confident in tackling real-world engineering problems and contributing to the open source community. Thank you LFX for this wonderful initiative!”
WasmEdge
I worked on making a Cpp frontend library for Apple’s new ML library MLX and then integrating it with the WasmEdge runtime env. It was challenging and involved writing a plugin and a new C++ extension library to make sure that the weights of NN models like LLAMA and Phi3 are loaded correctly and can be used with .wasm files.
Mentee: Aryan Gupta (Personal blog post about mentorship)
Mentors: Hung-Ying Tai
“I had a fantastic experience with the LFX mentorship programme. From being a complete newbie in the C++ world to writing an extension library and plugin for WasmEdge and MLX, the mentorship made me challenge myself to the fullest and learn a lot. After all, the best way to learn is to learn by doing.”