By Nate Waddington, Head of Mentorship & Documentation, CNCF
CNCF congratulates the 42 mentees who have graduated from the latest LFX mentorship program funded by CNCF! 21 CNCF Graduated, Incubating, and Sandbox projects, as well as TAGs, joined LFX this term with 49 opportunities for mentees, including CNCF TAG Network, Harbor, Jaeger, Konveyer AI, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Meshery.
Additional details on the CNCF projects, mentors, and students who successfully completed the program can be found below and on GitHub.
Intern profile highlights
Antrea
During my LFX Mentorship with the Antrea project, I tackled a challenging issue related to Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN)-based Network Policies.
Mentee: Hemant Kumar (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor:
“The Linux Foundation Mentorship Program has been a life-changing experience. It not only sharpened my technical skills but also instilled in me a newfound confidence and appetite for learning. Working on Antrea allowed me to dive deep into Kubernetes and Golang, while also teaching me the value of organized, high-quality code.
I’m immensely grateful to the Linux Foundation, the Antrea team, and my mentors — Antonin Bas, Yang Ding, and Quan Tian. Their support and guidance have shaped my perspective on open source and professional development.”
Envoy Gateway
My LFX Mentorship project focused on implementing IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack support in Envoy Gateway. The goal of this project was to enhance Envoy’s performance and flexibility by enabling it to handle both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic simultaneously in network environments. I contributed by improving Envoy’s ability to manage both IP versions through code contributions, testing, and adjusting network configurations. This experience allowed me to grow technically while contributing to an open-source project.
Mentee: Juwon Hwang (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Arko Dasgupta, Jianpeng He
“The LFX Mentorship program was an incredibly valuable experience. It provided me with the opportunity to strengthen my technical skills while working with cutting-edge technologies in an open-source community. With continuous support and feedback from mentors, I was able to overcome various challenges during the project. I gained a deeper understanding of open-source software development and the importance of collaboration. This experience has been a great asset to my career and has motivated me to continue contributing to open-source projects.”
Inspektor Gadget
My project is based on Event generation for the Inspektor-Gadget project. I worked on two approaches to generate these events. One by creating new container/pods in the kubernetes and generate events from there, another is when user will generate events from running container in their machine. DNS/HTTP two generators has been developed so far.
Mentee: Kapil Sharma
Mentor: Qasim Sarfraz and Burak OK
“I gained a lot from my journey in the LFX Mentorship program with Inspektor Gadget. During the three months, I learned about the design and technical details of the Inspektor-Gadget. I gained deep technical expertise in container runtime internals, Linux namespaces architecture, and Kubernetes networking. I implemented container namespace switching mechanisms, worked with container collection APIs, and enhanced pod networking functionalities. 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.”
Inspektor Gadget
My work aims to provide robust Inspektor Gadget tools for chaos engineering in cloud native environments.
Mentee: Bharadwaja Meherrushi Chittapragada (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Michael Friese and Mauricio Vásquez Bernal
“My LFX Mentorship Program experience was truly enriching and transformative. The guidance from my mentors, the support from the community, and the insightful weekly discussions were invaluable in shaping my contributions. Having direct mentorship provided clarity and direction, making the journey deeply rewarding. The program pushed me to conduct extensive research, evaluate multiple implementation strategies, and strike a balance between ambitious ideas and feasible solutions. Through code reviews, I gained a deeper understanding of writing optimal and performance-efficient code, while also learning the nuances of contributing to an open-source organization. It highlighted the importance of communication—something I initially struggled with but improved on through collaboration and feedback. Being vocal about my work opened opportunities to collaborate with others tackling similar challenges. I’m particularly grateful for my mentors’ flexibility and understanding of my academic commitments, which made the experience both productive and enjoyable. This mentorship has been a significant learning experience, and I am immensely thankful for the opportunity.”
Inspektor Gadget
This project focused on implementing a new gadget for detecting potential deadlocks in multi-threaded user space applications. Debugging and preventing deadlocks in modern, complex codebases can be challenging, and this gadget simplifies the process by identifying risks early, promoting safer and more efficient resource management.
Mentee: Snehil Shah
Mentor: Alban Crequy, Burak Ok
“Reflecting on these last few months, it has been an incredible learning endeavor into topics like eBPF, WebAssembly, Containers, and Linux kernel internals. Special thanks to my amazing mentors for making it an easy one, and to LFX, the CNCF community, and the incredible folks at Inspektor Gadget for this opportunity. As I graduate as an LFX mentee (and a fellow Inspektor), I walk away with valuable skills, experiences, and a community for life!”
Karmada
Enhance Karmada controller-manager and schedule testing coverage
Mentee: Anuj Agrawal (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Zhuang Zhang and Zhen Chang
While writing unit tests and working with Karmada was technically challenging, the real value came from understanding how large-scale cloud-native systems are built and maintained. Having mentors like Zhuang Zhang and Zhen Chang made the difference between just completing tasks and truly understanding cloud-native infrastructure. This wasn’t just surface-level work, it was about understanding the core mechanisms that make multi-cluster management possible. But beyond the technical achievements, what made this experience truly special was being part of a community and collaborating with like-minded individuals. Together, we weren’t just writing code; we were building something reliable for the entire cloud-native ecosystem.
KCL
My LFX Mentorship project focused on enhancing the KCL Package Manager (KPM) by integrating checksum validation for package integrity. I designed and implemented a Checker module to validate checksums and developed tools to update and validate package manifests within the OCI registry. Additionally, I automated the tool’s operations using GitHub Actions, streamlining the process and ensuring consistent execution. These contributions strengthened the security and reliability of KPM, improving the overall package management experience within the KCL ecosystem.
Mentee: Nishant Bansal (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Zong Zhe, Pengfei Xu
“My LFX Mentorship experience has been transformative. Under the guidance of expert mentors, I gained valuable technical skills while contributing to an impactful open-source project. The program allowed me to grow professionally and personally, providing opportunities to design and implement meaningful features within the KCL community. I learned about package integrity, checksum validation, and the tools supporting these processes. The feedback and collaborative spirit of my mentors and the broader open-source community made this an unforgettable experience, and I look forward to continuing my open-source journey.”
Konveyor AI
Data Querying for Kai & InstructLab Integration Potential
Mentee: Dev Jayesh Patel (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Jonah Sussman and Fabian von Feilitzsch
“My LFX Mentorship experience has been incredibly rewarding and transformative. Collaborating with seasoned software engineers gave me valuable insights into industry best practices, open-source development, and teamwork in real-world projects. The mentorship not only strengthened my technical skills but also helped me build confidence in tackling complex challenges. It was inspiring to be part of a community that values innovation and knowledge-sharing. This program has been a pivotal step in my growth as a developer, and I am immensely grateful for the opportunity to contribute to impactful projects while learning from the best.”
KubeArmor
Adding support to secure workloads on Podman, an OCI-compliant, daemonless container runtime, using OCI hooks enhancing KubeArmor’s security architecture. By replacing container runtime UNIX domain sockets with OCI hooks for OCI-compliant runtimes, KubeArmor can now address vulnerabilities and unauthorized container management, allowing secure interaction with containers.
Mentee: Cheithanya PR (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Barun Acharya, Rudraksh Pareek, Abdulrahman Elawady ,Rishabh Soni
“Participating in the LFX Mentorship Program has been an incredible journey of growth and learning. Over the past 12 weeks, I had the opportunity to dive deep into Kubearmor’s support to non k8s containers, refine my skills in Golang and container security, and collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the field. The unwavering support and mentorship from my mentors were instrumental in overcoming challenges and achieving the solutions. This program not only enhanced my technical abilities but also instilled a mindset of continuous learning and collaboration. I am immensely grateful for this transformative experience and look forward to contributing to the open-source community with renewed confidence and enthusiasm.”
KubeEdge
Mentee: Tejas Kumar
Mentor: Willard Hu
“I had a very positive experience during my LFX Mentorship period. The mentors were supportive, despite the language barriers we faced. I thoroughly enjoyed the work and it felt like a step up and I was able my push myself beyond my limits. I have gained thorough knowledge in Kubernetes, CRDs as well as on the project I was working on.”
Kyverno
During my LFX Mentorship, I contributed to Kyverno, a CNCF project, by enhancing its cleanup policies and TTL-based cleanup functionality to support the specification of the “deletionPropagationPolicy”. This feature enables users to define how Kubernetes resources are deleted—either cascading or non-cascading—when cleanup policies are triggered.
Mentee: Shivam Kumar (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Charles-Edouard Brétéché
“Participating in the LFX Mentorship program has been an incredibly enriching experience. It provided me with the opportunity to contribute to Kyverno, and deepen my understanding of cloud native technologies. The program offered invaluable guidance from my mentor, fostering my growth in open source development and helping me navigate complex problem-solving scenarios. I honed both my technical and collaborative skills while working on real-world challenges, which was immensely fulfilling. The supportive community and structured framework of the mentorship made this journey not only productive but also inspiring, igniting a stronger passion for contributing to the open-source ecosystem.”
Kyverno
My LFX Mentorship project focused on enhancing Kyverno’s autogen feature by developing a streamlined mechanism to evaluate policies for higher-level Kubernetes controllers without generating redundant rules. The project introduced a new implementation for autogen logic, enabling efficient transformation of resources into Pod or PodSpec structures and applying policies directly. This approach ensures better performance, reduces resource overhead, and simplifies policy evaluation workflows, contributing to Kyverno’s scalability and maintainability.
Mentee: Utsab Sapkota (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Charles-Edouard Breteche, Vishal Choudhary
“I am incredibly grateful for the guidance and support from my mentors throughout the LFX Mentorship program. Their deep knowledge of Kubernetes and Kyverno, along with their patience and willingness to help made this experience both educational and inspiring. They provided valuable feedback on my work, encouraged me to think critically, and were always approachable for discussions. Their mentorship helped me boost my confidence in contributing to open-source projects. I truly appreciate their effort and dedication in helping me grow, and I hope to carry forward their lessons in my future endeavors.”
Prometheus
My LFX Mentorship project focuses on contributing to PromBench, a tool used for testing Prometheus.
Mentee: Kushagra (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Kemal Akkoyun, Bryan Boreham
“My experience with the LFX Mentorship program has been incredibly enriching. Working with experienced mentors has significantly boosted my technical knowledge, and contributing to Prometheus has provided me with valuable hands-on experience. My mentors have been consistently supportive, guiding me whenever I faced challenges. This mentorship has not only deepened my understanding of the project but has also sparked my interest in continuing to contribute to Prometheus in the future, possibly on a part-time basis. Overall, the program has been a great learning opportunity and a step forward in my open-source journey.”
Meshery
I contributed to the Meshery project by enhancing its end-to-end (E2E) testing framework. This work ensures that Meshery and its complementary tools like Kanvas maintain high-quality integrations, enabling seamless management of cloud-native infrastructure and applications.
Mentee: Jerens Soerjadi Lensun (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Lee Calcote & Aabid Sofi
“Participating in the LFX Mentorship program has been an incredibly rewarding experience that allowed me to contribute meaningfully to the open-source ecosystem while developing my technical and professional skills. Through my work on the Meshery project, I gained hands-on experience with modern tools like Playwright and CI/CD pipelines, learned best practices for test automation using github actions, and improved my problem-solving abilities. The guidance and encouragement from my mentors and the supportive CNCF community made the journey even more enriching. This program not only deepened my understanding of cloud-native technologies but also inspired me to continue contributing to open source in the future.”
Thanos
My LFX Mentorship project focused on adding support for hedged requests in Thanos.
Mentee: Milind Dethe (Blog post on internship experience)
Mentor: Giedrius Statkevičius, Saswata Mukherjee
“My LFX Mentorship experience was both enriching and fulfilling. I had the chance to work on a meaningful project with incredible mentors who provided constant guidance and valuable insights. This experience helped me sharpen my technical skills, especially in handling large codebases and integrating new libraries. More than just coding, I learned the importance of perseverance, asking questions, and contributing to open source. It was a fantastic opportunity that boosted my confidence and deepened my passion for open source work.”