Google Summer of Code 2024 Work Product.md

Google Summer of Code 2024 Work Product.md

 

Google Summer of Code 2024: Work Product Submission

CNCF: Kubernetes Gateway API
Design and develop notification mechanism for ingress2gateway

Devaansh Kumar (@Devaansh-Kumar)

Project Abstract

The Gateway API project is the next generation of Kubernetes Ingress, Load Balancing, and Service Mesh APIs focusing on L4 and L7 routing. For the longest time, Kubernetes Ingress resource has been in use to help developers expose their applications and manage external access by providing HTTP and HTTPS routing rules to the services within a Kubernetes cluster.

To streamline the transition process and ensure seamless migration of existing Ingress resources as well as provider specific resources (Like Istio Gateway and VirtualService) within a Kubernetes cluster to the new Gateway API resources, a new tool called ingress2gateway has been created. It looks at all Ingress resources currently in the cluster and converts them to equivalent Gateway API resources: Gateway, HTTPRoute, TLSRoute, TCPRoute, UDPRoute, GRPCRoute and ReferenceGrants as well as resources based on the provider used.

However ingress2gateway does not provide the users with useful notification regarding conversion results, warnings and crucial messages about their resource conversion. This project seeked to design a generic notification system that provides such information to the user about overview of changes, partial conversions, fields that cannot be converted and fields that are not supported by the tool, but supported by Gateway API.

Github Issue: Build a notification system/process to report conversion results

Mentors: Lior Lieberman (@LiorLieberman), Mattia Lavacca (@mlavacca)

Work Done

The Project began with discussing the different approaches that can be taken and creating small POCs for all such possibilities during the Community Bonding Period. Once the approach was ready we started implementing the solution and documenting the steps in a Google Doc.

I had weekly meets with both my mentors where I showcased my progress. All my work was done on a forked repository from which pull requests were created. Link: Devaansh-Kumar/ingress2gateway

Project Pull Requests: ingress2gateway Repository PR

List of tasks completed in relation to the project:

• Implemented the notifications package.
• Generated tables from notifications package to display notifications using tablewriter.
• Migrated different providers to utilise notifications as well enabled notifications from common package.
• Created unit tests for notifications and enhanced existing unit tests as well.
• Created new flag --notifications-output-file to specify the file where to output notifications.

Contributions during GSoC Period

Pull Request	Description	Status
#160	Implemented basic support for notifications package and created notifications for Istio VirtualService	Merged
#170	Created Unit Tests for notifications	Merged
#171	Added notifications for Istio Gateway conversion	Merged
#173	Added notifications for Kong provider	Merged
#176	Added notifications for Apisix provider	Merged
#177	Added notifications for Ingress-Nginx provider	Merged
#178	Added notifications for OpenAPI3 provider	Merged
#180	Implemented notification mechanism from common package	Open
#181	Created new flag --notifications-output-file to specify where to output notifications	Open

Contributions Prior to GSoC

Pull Request	Description	Status
#2836	Implemented gwctl describe namespace	Merged
#2872	Implemented gwctl describe policycrds	Merged

Current State and Future Improvements

While ingress2gateway has come a long way, we still need more providers to onboard their implementation onto the tool, so that more users can transition to Gateway API.

Acknowledgement

I want to express my deep gratitude to my mentors for granting me this incredible opportunity. They, along with the organization, have been exceptionally approachable and have continuously offered their support and guidance throughout the project. Additionally my mentors also presented me with an opportunity to present my work at a CNCF webinar which will air on 12th September and also helped me draft a proposal to submit a talk on my GSoC experience for KubeCon+CloudNativeCon India 2024. I am excited to continue contributing and learning more from the organization.

Hi @utkarshkrsingh. Yes you can definitely apply as a beginner, thats what the entire program is for. Even I was a beginner when I started preparing for GSoC.

Some tips would be to try to decide the organisation you want to contribute to early so you can spend time playing with the code and making some improvements. I had decided by January to contribute to CNCF but it took me a while to choose the right organisation.

Another tip would be to attend community meetings and introduce yourself and get any doubts cleared. Many organisations keep a google doc for meeting notes where you may find discussions of the organisation participating in LFX/GSoC.

Most people say to search for good first issues while starting out. But I would say you can try out the regular issues as well.

Hi @utkarshkrsingh. Yes you can definitely apply as a beginner, thats what the entire program is for. Even I was a beginner when I started preparing for GSoC.

Some tips would be to try to decide the organisation you want to contribute to early so you can spend time playing with the code and making some improvements. I had decided by January to contribute to CNCF but it took me a while to choose the right organisation.

Another tip would be to attend community meetings and introduce yourself and get any doubts cleared. Many organisations keep a google doc for meeting notes where you may find discussions of the organisation participating in LFX/GSoC.

Most people say to search for good first issues while starting out. But I would say you can try out the regular issues as well.

Hey! Would love some tips on choosing the right cncf project for gsoc :)

Hey! Would love some tips on choosing the right cncf project for gsoc :)

Hi @Atharva-Kanherkar.

While I was searching for orgs within CNCF, one of my criteria was that it should have a good and active community. So I would suggest to join various slack channels of such orgs and try to attend some meetings to see how they work.

Also you can get to know what orgs are applying for GSoC/LFX a little earlier than the official release of org list by looking at this repo. Here orgs make PRs proposing their project ideas and this can give you a headstart on researching the right orgs.

Hi @utkarshkrsingh. Yes you can definitely apply as a beginner, thats what the entire program is for. Even I was a beginner when I started preparing for GSoC.

Some tips would be to try to decide the organisation you want to contribute to early so you can spend time playing with the code and making some improvements. I had decided by January to contribute to CNCF but it took me a while to choose the right organisation.

Another tip would be to attend community meetings and introduce yourself and get any doubts cleared. Many organisations keep a google doc for meeting notes where you may find discussions of the organisation participating in LFX/GSoC.

Most people say to search for good first issues while starting out. But I would say you can try out the regular issues as well.

@Devaansh-Kumar thank you for the encouraging response and helpful tips! It’s inspiring to know you started as a beginner too—it gives me confidence.

I’ll focus on CNCF, explore the codebase, and attend community meetings as you suggested. Checking meeting notes and tackling regular issues along with good first issues are great tips—I’ll keep them in mind.

Thanks again for your guidance! I’ll reach out if I have any doubts.

Best regards,
Utkarsh

Hi @Devaansh-Kumar . I am planning on contributing to cncf for gsoc next year and i am grateful for the tips you provided above. Can you touch upon the general tech stack one must know before starting to contribute ? (I am primarily a MERN stack developer and have built basic backends in Go, I know docker and Kubernetes.