Cloud Native Computing Foundation KCD Indonesia 2021, 18 Dec 2021

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Keynote: How to Contribute to Kubernetes - Nikhita Raghunath

Description

Nikhita is ex-Steering Committee Member of the Upstream Kubernetes Open Source organization. She shares the easiest way to start making code, docs, and other form of contributions to Kubernetes project, and how did it impact her professional career by being active in an open source organization.

#kubernetes #cncf #kcd

A

Hey everyone, thanks for having me in kubernetes community days, indonesia, today I'll be talking a little bit about how you can get started with contributing to kubernetes a little bit about me and why I'm talking about this topic, I'm a staff engineer at vmware and I work on kubernetes open source full time.

A

uh I know I'm really lucky to be able to get paid to work on open source as part of my day job, and I understand that that might not be the case for everyone and also know that it's a little harder to contribute to open source or be harder to contribute to open source if you're not paid to work on it. So we'll look into some strategies on how you can mitigate that um also been working in open source in the last four years.

A

I'm the technical lead for one of the groups in kubernetes that deals with automation, called sick contributor experience. I was also on the kubernetes steering committee for two years and my term ended just last month. So, for those who are not aware, the steering committee uh is the top most body of kubernetes that governs the world project, I'm also a cncf ambassador, and I work with the larger cncf community too.

A

uh You can find me at github and twitter at these places and now with that, out of the way, let's dive right in uh so giri, one of the organizers for kcd, reached out to me a few weeks ago about presenting a talk at this conference about contributing to kubernetes.

A

uh He said that the wonderful kubernetes community in indonesia is growing exponentially and how we'd love to see the community get more involved with the project directly as well. So I want to talk a little bit more about the contributors from indonesia who are actually doing this work right now.

A

Please consider reaching out to these folks if you are interested in get getting started too, uh so in absolutely no particular order at all. uh Let's start with giri, so giri has been truly amazing, with leading the indonesia community and especially the six docs localization efforts to localize documentation into indonesian uh he's also involved in cluster api and cube spray.

A

Talking about ud they've been involved with autoscaler and docs. Localization too, is in a lot of places, including contributing to testing community infrastructure cluster api and not just the cluster api project itself, but also the providers related to it, including cluster api provider gcp and including the digital ocean providers. There's a lot a lot of places, uh then we have habib who's, also been contributing to testing and docs.

A

Localization uh they've been involved in a few pr's to do some refactoring in the main kubernetes repo as well, and finally, value has been contributing to docs localization too one of my favorite contributors, erie, has been an amazing leader.

A

She was a sick, doc's chair in the past and has helped let the whole docs group uh she's also made valuable contributions to the customized repo.

A

Finally, we've got dany and alice who've been doing good work with doc's localization curious to all of these folks for contributing and please again consider reaching out to them. If you'd like to hear more about their journey.

A

Well, now that we saw so many people contributing from indonesia, let's see why you need to care about open source and I'm not going to sugarcoat any of the reasons. uh Let's dive right into the numbers and also as we will, we all care about being employed at the end of the day and making more money at our jobs.

A

The recent linux foundation's open source jobs report has shown that one, the demand for open source engineers is increasing day by day and hiring managers are 70 percent, more likely to hire someone if they have open source experience. Now, speaking about my own employer, we are also definitely looking for more and more open source engineers.

A

At the same time, even though demand has increased, a whopping, 93 percent of hiring managers said that they actually have difficulty finding engineers who have this experience, there's demand but there's less supply, and also personally from experience. I would say that, while there is a growing open source ecosystem in asia as a whole, there is still a huge lack of open source engineer. So if you develop expertise in these areas, it will make you easily hireable.

A

And finally, you might have seen this discussed in lots of tech news websites nowadays as well. The market is pretty hot right now there are a lot of jobs, opening up that pay, a decent amount of money. So it's the best time to develop open source skills and level up in your career.

A

So we saw that open source is pretty useful to your job as well, and when people start contributing to open source all kubernetes in general, they usually complain actually a few things, so let's see what they are and how we can tackle them.

A

First, what I hear is that contributing to kubernetes is scary, because maybe you haven't contributed to open source before and the whole aspect of it looks scary, intimidating the code base is so huge that you absolutely don't know where to get started at all.

A

It's hard learning the code base and knowing how to write code for the project is not easy, but it doesn't have to be the scary, intimidating and hard. So, let's see how we can make this easier. How can we go from being scared to being happy and being comfortable about the idea of contributing to kubernetes directly?

A

Let's dive right in the community is divided into multiple groups. Now this is very important to understand, because I will be using the word sick many times in this talk, so the most common one that you've probably heard of earlier is also sick. It's a special interest group, so like sick auth, which deals with authentication six cli, which deals with cuba, ctl and testing, which deals with testing aspects.

A

These are the groups which actually own code in the project. Then you have working groups which are temporary groups which are created for cross, sick work, so, let's say sing. Auth and testing want to work on something specific. They will create a new working group to work on that topic.

A

We also have user groups with the focus towards users of kubernetes, and then committees which deal with some sensitive items.

A

This diagram gives a very big picture overview of which things are there. For instance, you have horizontal sticks like api machinery, authentication and cli that that's a variety of areas in the project, and then you have vertical sticks like auto scaling that specifically dive deeper into the auto scaling area.

A

Looking at some of and many of these projects actually in the six can get intimidating. So let's see how we can easily find a project to work on in this whole landscape of sex.

A

Here are some tips to help you with that. Firstly, pick a project that is related to your job, so you can convince your manager to let you work on this during workouts. Remember that we don't want to be doing this during our free time, if possible, because we don't want to burn out. We want to keep the sustainable and we want to be able to do this during our workouts when we're actually paid to write code.

A

So one suggestion I give people is that go to your manager with a list of reasons why you're working on this project and why it's important to the business and come up with a plan where you can just start contributing to the project for four hours per week. Yes, trust four hours per week, most managers are okay with the four hours per week approach. Once they see how beneficial this is, you can ask them to increase this duration.

A

uh The next is pretty obvious. It obviously needs to be something you're interested in, for example, if you use cube cdl a lot which I'm guessing a lot of you are here are familiar with it. You can look into contributing to 6cli if you are interested in networking, look into sig networking and so on then. Finally, look at programming languages you're, already familiar with I'm not going to like getting started with open source, has its own learning curve and, if you add an unfamiliar language to that mix, it might get even more intimidating.

A

So it's better to start with languages that you already know. Most of the code in the kubernetes project is written in go, but we have clients in python, java, rust and other languages as well, and then look for projects that have good documentation.

A

Sadly, there are a lot of six uh there with limited documentation uh and getting involved in those six might be lifted difficult if you are a beginner, so look for things that have good documentation.

A

Another thing I suggest is to look out for projects that have clearly defined roles. For example, we have a release team for each kubernetes release. We also have clearly defined rules for what each person in the release team does and we provide very close mentorship for those roles.

A

Lots of beginners and kubernetes actually got started this way and I'll talk a little bit more about it later. So to recall, pick something related to your job and interest with a text tag that you're already familiar with and pick a project that can give you a smooth, onboarding part.

A

Now, once you know what to work on get to know the six all six and other such groups have mailing lists and slack channels where you can interact and ask questions to the maintainers. They also have public meetings that are published on youtube and we love using emojis, so please feel free to use as many emojis as you would like how you said that even interacting on sometime slack can sometimes get intimidating and you might feel like you just don't know what you're doing so.

A

In that case, I suggest to look around just be on slack. Maybe you don't have to talk at that time, but just understand who is working on what what tasks are being worked on and what's on the roadmap? What are people planning to work on that will give you an idea and an understanding of the culture of how people interact, and you can adapt that to that way. So it's not too intimidating. When you start talking to people, we also have three special indonesia specific slack channels.

A

If you're not already in these channels, I'd really suggest you to join them. The kubernetes docs id group channel is for contributors mainly for docs localization. Then you have id users for users in indonesia, kubernetes users in indonesia, and then you have id events for events happening in indonesia. If you're not on the kubernetes slack, you can get an invite at slack dot, kh dot io again. This is like, if you get one thing out of this talk, let it be this.

A

uh Please join me slack channels again, if you're not on the kubernetes stack, please join at slack dot. Kids cool now talking about contributing the first thing that you need to do is to set up your development environment or, in other words, prepare your computer in such a way that you can start contributing. So how do you go about doing that?

A

Just one word documentation in the initial stages of your journey. You should be spending a lot of time. Reading, documentation you can find documentation at the kubernetes contributor website directly. The kubernetes contributor website is at kubernetes.dev, it's very easy to remember, kubernetes.dev, and there is a clear section for contributor documentation here that can help you set up your development environment.

A

I'm talking more about documentation, here's a tip on how to approach them once you start looking at docs. It can also get very scary because there are so many docs strewn across the web pages. So first start with user facing docs to understand the project and features better.

A

Once you are familiar with the project, what features are there? What kind of configuration you need to learn a deployment or a port? Something like that after you're familiar with that move on to the contributor facing docs? This is what we just talked about: that setting up your development environment. The kubernetes.dev website. Look at that then read the design documents, otherwise called kepts in the kubernetes project. We call it keps, kubernetes, enhancements proposals, keps to understand the history and context for why the features that you just learned about they were built that way and why?

A

What is the? Why behind everything that ties in kubernetes together and finally, if you come across- something that you don't understand in these talks, ask questions on slack and contribute fixes back to these docs yourself and voila. By the end of this whole approach, you have actually contributed to the project by contributing to the project's documentation.

A

So to recap: first, you look at user phases in docs. Another second step look at contributor facing docs as a third step. You look at design documents and, finally, you make changes to the documents yourself, based on any feedback that you might have.

A

Okay, now, let's tackle another biggest question on everyone's minds. What is it? Let me just get right into it. What task should I work on? That is the biggest question on everyone's minds once they start through with the basics. This is the hard part. So, let's see what you can do the easiest way to get started if you're already using the project is to scratch an edge. What does this mean? So if you want a feature you go and implement it. If you found a bug in kubernetes, you go and fix it.

A

uh These can also be smaller things like maybe you are reading the code base. You found that the code isn't clear, so you refactor it and add some comments to the code.

A

uh Another most systematic approach is to look for github labels called good first issue and help want it. So these labels signify that an issue is beginner friendly. It's easier to get started with and has mentorship available as well. Most contributors to open source get started using this route.

A

Another way is to participate in roadmap planning directly so before each release, all six go through a roadmap planning session, so you can also look around initially, so you don't really have to join these planning sessions at the first go and start talking, you can just look around and understand what people are working on.

A

So, if you show up in these planning sessions- and you see- someone mention a cool feature that they're working on you can reach out to them after the meeting to ask what you can help with this will allow you to meet more people in the project will allow you to impact the critical parts of the project, because you know that okay, this is important for the roadmap.

A

Now. Having said all that, not all contributions have to be about code, of course, there are many ways to contribute without coding, one way is definitely documentation. We already saw that many folks from indonesia have been doing phenomenal work with respect to localization. So that's one part that you can definitely get involved in uh so one way other than docs is to participate in issue triage, so things like making sure all issues have the right set of github labels.

A

This might sound small right now, but you have no idea how much it can make the maintainers lives easier and they would be really really thankful to you for that. So this is a very impactful thing, no matter how small it sounds, you can also write blog posts explaining more about a particular topic or feature most projects have teams for community management. So things like writing, contributor documentation, the kubernetes.dev website we talked you can also develop mentorship programs for the projects and such so on.

A

You can also organize many events. For example, in kubernetes there is a team organizing the kubernetes contributing to summer each year and also in pre-covered world. All of the kubernetes summit organizers got the additional talk that their travel to the international locations where these summits and conferences could take place would be completely funded. uh So it's important to know that you're not just doing this for fun.

A

You also get rewarded for it, so your travel and everything is completely paid for uh the things I just talked about now are very very important when you're growing up the contributor ladder now, once you start with contributing, you are a non-member once you make significant amount of contributions, you get added to a member of the kubernetes project and, finally, when you move up to, then you move up to something called as a reviewer, where you're reviewing code approval means that you actually sign off on code and owner.

A

Is you actually own that particular code and you are responsible for giving the technical direction for that piece of code?

A

So, as you move up, leadership, qualities and the ability to handle big swaths of new contributors become more and more crucial and all of the non-code contributions that we just talked about were the actual things that helped me become. The technical lead for one of the groups and kubernetes and also become a kubernetes steering committee member. So please remember that these non-code contributions are also very important, so please don't discount them ever so. We have also many mentorship programs to help with you. Moving up the contributor ladder.

A

For instance, there are many group mentoring sessions where multiple mentees are paired with a single mentor. The mentor works for them to onboard them to the project. Right now we have a group mentoring session going on for sick docs. Kubernetes also participates in other mentorship programs like google summer of code outreach and the lfx mentorship program. Where you get paid to work on open source for a few months, uh the payment usually ranges up to six thousand dollars.

A

uh The release team again uh has very specific roles with leads and shadows for each role, so how it works is that the shadows are mentioned and the lead acts as a mentor. You are not expected to know much about the work as a mentee, and these mentors will help guide you through.

A

So this is a very, very critical mentorship uh group that we have in the kubernetes community and lots of contributors get started this way now, at the end, I'll say that contributing to the kubernetes project has really really changed my life and I'm not exaggerating, and I'm not trying to sell you kubernetes at all.

A

uh Even uh it really gave me a chance to like make me really visible on an international scale and I even got a chance to give a keynote at coupon barcelona in front of more than 8 000 people on a big stage, and I would truly never have gotten this experience if not for open source.

A

So I hope you also contribute find a project that you like working on and stick around and actually move up in the community. uh Thank you so much again for attending this session, uh and hopefully I will see you along in open source. Thank you.

A