In the ever-evolving landscape of open-source software development, fostering the growth of young talents and innovators is essential. One remarkable program that stands at the forefront of this mission is the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). For years, GSoC has been an invaluable platform for students to collaborate with prominent open-source organizations, and Apache CloudStack is proud to be a part of this transformative journey.
As an open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, Apache CloudStack has consistently provided a robust, scalable, and reliable solution for building and managing cloud environments. With a global community of developers and contributors, CloudStack has had an ongoing commitment to the GSoC programme and its students in the last years. We believe that young talents should be led in their open-source journey and projects shall be willing to help them learn and develop new skills and knowledge.
A Word From this Year’s Participant and Mentor
“Working on the Apache CloudStack project gave me the opportunity to understand how cloud computing infrastructure as a service works, the usage of nested virtualization and all other technical aspects involved.
The community has been really welcoming and supportive, and I’m excited to be a part of this community.”
- Ayush Pandey, GSoC 2023 Student
“I am very excited to be coordinating the CloudStack projects for the Google Summer of Code 2023 and mentoring Ayush on his project. I think GSOC is a great experience as an introduction to open-source projects and meeting its community, and from the mentor side it’s a great opportunity to meet and support talented people.”
- Nicolas Vazquez, GSoC 2023 Mentor
The Impact of GSoC on Open-source Technologies
In 2023, the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program made a resounding impact on the world of open-source software development. With an impressive participation of 966 new contributors from across the globe, GSoC facilitated their engagement in 12+ week projects, collaborating with 168 open-source organizations. This global initiative united mentors and contributors hailing from over 75 countries, creating a dynamic ecosystem of innovation and learning.
For nearly two decades, GSoC has thrived on the collective enthusiasm of open-source communities and the dedication of 19,000+ volunteer mentors, each spending between 50 to 150 hours guiding over 20,000 contributors since 2005. In 2023, this tradition continued with 168 mentoring organizations and a staggering 1,950 mentors supporting the program.
A Preview of the Work Completed by GSoC Students
This year, Ayush worked on adding implementation of import/export instances to the KVM hypervisor. The unmanaging instance feature is only available for the VMWare hypervisor in the latest version of CloudStack. This summer, Ayush worked on extending it to the KVM hypervisor. Click here to learn more about his project - https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2023/projects/f0gpheQM
You can also see the CloudStack community submission to GitHub here - https://github.com/apache/cloudstack/pull/7712
In last year’s CloudStack Collaboration Conference, a previous GSoC mentor, Daan Hoogland, held a talk, where he reviewed the involvement of CloudStack in GSoC, and looked at some of the work done by the GSoC students.
