OPENINFRA USER GROUPS

Helena Spease, Marketing & Community Associate, OpenInfra Foundation

In 2021, we saw 951 new members join various User Groups across the globe. The Indonesia OpenStack User Group experienced the largest growth with 277 new members in 2021.

Amidst challenging circumstances, User Groups showed their commitment to the community by organizing a total of 21 meetups across 9 different groups this past year that reached hundreds in their respective communities. While many User Groups remained virtual, the OpenInfra Lower Saxony User Group and OpenInfra User Group Sweden were able to host a few in-person events. Overall, 2021 saw a mix of virtual, hybrid, and in-person events. The OpenStack and Open Infrastructure Korea User Group even held an event on YouTube Live to close out the year.

OUTREACHY PROGRAM

Samuel de Medeiros Queiroz, Outreachy Program Coordinator

Five interns were funded through the Outreachy Program to support the OpenStack project and global community.

• Sunday Mgbogu from Nigeria who added support for OpenStack resources reconciliation in Kuryr-Kubernetes
• Kafilat Adeleke from Nigeria who added support for share types quotas
• cenne.d who exposed boot mode and secure boot status in the Ironic API
• Archana Kumari from India who contributed to OpenStackSDK support for Manila
• Mahnoor A. from Pakistan who worked on auto-Documenting REST API classes for Ironic

MENTORSHIP AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY

Throughout 2021, the relationship between the OpenStack community and Boston University continued to grow through the continued mentorship of three students in the Senior Design course and, in the following semester, in the Fundamentals of Cloud Computing course for undergraduates at Boston University. Both groups of students worked on the OpenStackClient and the OpenStackSDK.

The Senior Design students worked with the Manila team to get the OpenStackClient closer to parity with the python-manilaclient. The Senior Design Students were Ashley Rodriguez, Mark Tony, and Nicole Chen. Following her completion of the course, Ashley went on to be hired by one of our member companies- Red Hat- and is continuing her work on Manila and the OpenStackClient.

Students in the Fundamentals of cloud computing course focused on a different storage service- Cinder. They worked on implementing the functionality that the python-cinderclient has into the OpenStackClient. Soon, a new group of students from another university will pick up where they left off furthering the effort. Thanks to Thrivikram Mudunuri, Suneeth Ravi, Diwei Zhu, Ritvik Vinodkumar and Ujjval Sharma, we are making excellent progress towards parity.

MENTORSHIP AT NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIVERSITY

From January through May the OpenStack community participated in North Dakota State University's Capstone course. The course focuses on giving students real world experience by working with industry folks on projects throughout the semester. In 2021, four students were mentored by a few members of the OpenStackSDK/OSC team (Stephen Finucane, Artem Goncharov, and Kendall Nelson) to work on the Cinder implementation in the OpenStackSDK.

• Hudson Dahly
• James Palmer
• Alex Wilcox
• Dylan Zapzalka

Between the four students they pushed a total of 19 patches to the OpenStackSDK and made a lot of progress towards parity with the python-cinderclient. Once the cinder APIs are implemented in the OpenStackSDK, and then the OpenStackClient is extended to include them, the cinderclient can then be deprecated.

In preparation for the next run of the course, both OpenStack and Kata Containers submitted projects for students to chose from and in early 2022, both projects will begin mentoring students for the semester. This will be the first time that Kata is participating in such a program.

MENTORSHIP AT OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

In 2021 our relationship with Oregon State University continued to flourish The OpenInfra Foundation continues to fund this program to increase the active contributor base, so thanks to the Foundation members who make this possible! We had one student for most of the year, Ryan Zimmerman, working upstream in the OpenStack community. He spent all of his time on reaching parity between the OpenStackSDK and the python-novaclient and succeeded. With his efforts, the groundwork has been laid to now finish the migration from the project specific client to the OpenStackClient. This is part of community wide efforts to migrate all the project specific clients' functionalities to the OpenStackClient simplifying the user experience.

In December, two new students began picking up where Ryan Zimmerman left off. Violet Kurtz and Ryan Persson began onboarding shortly before the end of their school semester. They are now working on using the nova specific APIs implemented in the OpenStackSDK to achieve parity between the python-novaclient with the OpenStackClient. Once they complete the Nova work, they will focus their efforts on doing the same with Cinder.

OPENSTACK UPSTREAM INSTITUTE

The training was held twice throughout the year. The first training took place as part of the Open Source Day stand alone event held by the Anita B Foundation who also hosts the Grace Hopper Celebration. The ratio of mentors to students was very high (2:1) which yielded not only a productive day full of good discussions, but a highly specialized experience for the attendees that participated in the event. Upstream Institute was held in a one-day format where the mentors focused on sharing information about the OpenStack community including the tools and processes that contributors use on a daily basis.

The afternoon section of the training concentrated on hands-on experience where students worked on reproducing and fixing bugs in the OpenStack code base. Attendees who were able to stay for the afternoon learned how to push a code change upstream for review and several of them were able to go above and beyond. They were able to reproduce their bugs and also submit a fix to it. The training was very sucessful and we got great feedback and engagement from students.

The second training held in 2021 was also an online training that was held as part of the Open Source Day within the Grace Hopper Celebration in October. Similar to the first rendition, the training was held in one-day format with lectures in the morning and hands-on exercises in the afternoon. Again, the students worked on fixing real bugs and the more than 14 mentors made sure that attendees learned the mechanics of uploading a change for review, which is essential to be able to contribute code or documentation after the course. Four attendees pushed patches for bugs that were real fixes to OpenStack and as a result, they entered into a drawing that Grace Hopper was hosting to incentivize working on open source.

While the possibilities to hold the training were again, very limited in 2021, a group of mentors keep maintaining the course material to ensure it is up to date for every training occasion to provide the best experience to the students who joined. The content, being fully open source and available online, provides the possibility for individuals and organizations to go through it as a self-paced course or run it locally.

You can read the full 2021 OpenInfra Annual Report here!