Ceph Student Devs Hit Midterm for Google Summer of Code 2014

Last week marked the halfway point for the Google Summer of Code, and Ceph developers received high marks. Two student developers are currently contributing code to the open source project, working closely with knowledgeable mentors from the Ceph community and Red Hat. In February 2014, Ceph was accepted as a mentoring organization to the prestigious Google program, which pairs student developers with open source projects to contribute code.

Among other interesting stats, this year's Google Summer of Code matches 1,300 student developers across 73 countries with 190 organizations, offering them the opportunity to hone their development skills through hands-on experience with open source projects. Over the course of three months, Ceph's two student developers will contribute code to Ceph, each working on specific proposals they submitted.

Student developer Kevin Cox will work on creating a Wireshark dissector that parses the Ceph protocol. He will be mentored by Sage Weil, Principle Ceph Architect, who started the project as an academic pursuit 10 years ago. Sage was a part of the team that designed Ceph under a Department of Energy grant for his Ph.D. research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2004.

A Google Summer of Code 2013 alumna, student developer Veronica Estrada will work on adding erasure coding to Ceph's durability modeling. She will be mentored by renowned French free software developer and activist Loic Dachary, who has been involved with the Free Software Movement since 1987, and Kyle Bader, a solutions architect at Red Hat. Stipends will be provided to the two students from Google as they contribute code throughout the summer.

"I think it's essential to network and collaborate with communities that are working in the real world. Among all open source projects participating in GSoC, Ceph is an excellent option for my research topic," said Veronica Estrada. "I had fun and gained good experience from GSoC13 and I expect to repeat it. Not to mention, for a student, GSoC is a fantastic opportunity to make some extra money during summer while gaining hands-on development experience and familiarity with the open source ecosystem."

"This summer I will work on a Wireshark dissector for the Ceph protocol as a Google Summer of Code project. This will provide both developers and sysadmins with a powerful tool to track Ceph transmissions over the network," said Cox. "I'm really looking forward to working with and getting to know the Ceph community and am excited to make Ceph's first GSoC a successful one."

We're very happy to be participating in a program that has been running for more than a decade and has worked with 7,500 students from 97 countries and 7,000 mentors from 100 countries. Collectively, more than 50 million lines of code have been written through these global mentorships, and we're proud that our students and Ceph project mentors get to be a part of the next 50 million.