Red Hat Open Source Contest
Here, by this blog, I want to share my insights and experience of participating in the Red Hat Open Source Contest (RHOSC). My motive is to make others aware of RHOSC and to make them understand how they can effectively contribute to real-world projects.
But what is RHOSC?
It is an initiative of the Red Hat for students during which students understand how easy it is to participate and contribute to open-source projects. Participants work with one of the Red Hat mentors. Participants select the project as per their interest by selecting the mentor from the list of projects.
This is the link to get more info about the participation.
Before starting with my experience and project let me make you familiar with some terminologies beforehand:
- OpenStack: It is an open-source platform that uses pooled virtual resources to build and manage private and public clouds. It is like a cloud operating system controlling large pools of computing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, all managed and provisioned through APIs with common authentication mechanisms.
- Ansible: Ansible is an automation language. Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015.
- Jetpack: It is the easiest way to deploy OpenStack on baremetal. JetPack will install OpenStack using infrared on a set of homogeneous servers and users can run it from their laptop or an ansible jump host.
- Browbeat: Browbeat is a performance tuning and analysis tool for OpenStack. Browbeat is free, Open Source software.
- Analyze and tune your Cloud for optimal performance.
- Create Rally workloads for performance and scale testing.
- Automate deployment of common data analysis tools.
Now, I am beginning with my journey of fun-filled learning:
While filling the form I went through the project spreadsheet and chose the jetpack project under Asma Suhani S H (Red Hat). The reason behind choosing a specific project because I was familiar with ansible.
- At the beginning(first two weeks), I developed an understanding of the project and how it works, what are its different components and all those aspects. My mentor assigned me the task to “Delete the first node automatically from instackenv.json file”. This task was to clear my understanding and get more ideas about the codebase and familiarity of the project.
Challenges faced:
Even exploring the project we always left the custom of maintenance, which I did in starting, the project was in ansible purely but I did my task in python.
Learning:
I learned that understanding the tradition of a project is equally important as understanding the project to contribute.
- My first task on the project was to “Automate the RHEL image URL and virtual interface”(for virtual undercloud).
Challenges faced:
I had to follow the trend of the codebase of the project and it took me a while since I was from python background.
Learning:
It improved my coding practice as a professional and then inside virtual_undercloud.yml automate the OS as per the release version.
- After the first task, I step forward with “Automation virtual_uc interface”.
Challenges faced: Main problem faced was where to define the interface because I was doing it in the wrong location but at the right location I was missing out some params which needed to execute my file.
Learning: This was the time consuming one as well as my understanding of how virtual undercloud works improved a lot.
- After the above tasks, my mentor introduced me with browbeat which was used in jetpack internally.
Task: This was the easiest one, I added some scenarios in rally/neutron (framework for OpenStack). After that I executed the scenarios in jetpack where browbeat was installed.
So, Here are my parting words to all readers:
I got this opportunity under Performance and Scale Team, Red Hat and the over all experience was awesome from introduction to wrap up and I got a lot of learning and support from my mentor. This contest surely helps to cope up with the fear of contributing to industry-standard open-source projects and cultivate the developer within oneself. My advice to future learners not to be overwhelmed with the technology names once you start learning you will eventually get your grip and Red Hat also provides learning material to help you out with new technologies.
Keep Learning :) !!!
