GSoC 2022

GSoC 2022 projects

2022 Project Ideas

GitOps for Keptn

The configuration of a Keptn project requires a lot of imperative commands, executed in the right order.

The idea is to extend the current Keptn and Keptn GitOps operators for more management use-cases based on the prototypes created as a part of the Enhancement Proposal. Particular details are to be discussed in the project chat with potential mentors.

  • More info: KEP-67 - Keptn and GitOps
  • Slack channel for technical discussion: #wg-keptn-gitops-operator
  • Areas to study/improve: Golang, Kubernetes, Operators, Configuration Management
  • Project size: 175 or 350 hours, depending on the scope
  • Difficulty: Medium/High
  • Potential mentor(s): Thomas Schuetz, Oleg Nenashev, Suraj Banakar

Keptn Plugin for Backstage

Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. As the website states, “powered by a centralized software catalog, Backstage restores order to your infrastructure and enables your product teams to ship high-quality code quickly — without compromising autonomy”. It would be nice to provide Keptn integration for this portal so that Keptn can connect as many as other tools. See all Backstage Plugins.

A Possible solution could be a specialized plugin for Keptn using Keptn REST API and/or CLI. It might be also possible to create a unified plugin for Keptn and other CI/CD tools, e.g. implemented on the top of the Cloud Events / CDEvents standard.

  • More info: https://github.com/keptn/keptn/issues/6407
  • Slack channel for technical discussion: #wg-backstage-integrations
  • Areas to study/improve: Golang, JavaScript, React, Backstage
  • Project size: 175 hours
  • Potential mentor(s): Oleg Nenashev, Dmitry Meytin, Afzal Ansari

Improve GitHub Integration in Keptn

GitHub is widely used in proprietary and open source projects. Several GitHub Actions that could be used to interact with Keptn are available: sending events to Keptn or installing Keptn on a GKE cluster, It would be great to provide deeper integration between Keptn and GitHub, especially to provide better user experience for users.

Potential use-cases that could be addressed in the project:

  • GitHub App Authentication Service with support for executing GitHub REST API calls with GitHub App authentication. It is required for accessing GitHub’s Checks API and Deployments API
  • Support for triggering GitHub Actions from Keptn so that it can invoke GitHub actions from its sequences and auto-remediation steps. See Keptn Issue #2670 for more details.
  • Reporting application statuses to Deployments API. It would be nice if Keptn could report deployment status to GitHub when performing Deployment and auto-remediation sequences.
  • Reporting Service Level Objectives(SLOs) and quality gate evaluation results to Checks API. If Keptn quality gate evaluation is triggered from a GitHub branch/pull request (e.g. staging or preview environment deployment in GitHub Actions based CI/CD), it would be nice if Keptn coud report evaluation summaries to the Checks API

Summary:

  • Areas to study/improve: Golang, GitHub API, JavaScript
  • Slack channel for technical discussion: #keptn-integrations
  • Project size: 175 or 350 hours, depending on the scope
  • Difficulty: Medium/High
  • Potential mentor(s): Oleg Nenashev, Brad McCoy

Integration for GitOps-based Deployment Tools (e.g. ArgoCD/Flux)

Flux and ArgoCD are tools which are widely used to deploy cloud native applications in a GitOps way. As such, it would bring a very huge benefit to the ecosystem to find a way how such GitOps tools could be integrated into keptn and return deployment states after the state has been synced. This project would be done in collaboration with flux and keptn maintainers.

  • Areas to study/improve: Golang, argocd, flux, deployment, gitops
  • Slack channel for technical discussion: #keptn-integrations
  • Project size: 175 hours
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Potential mentor(s): Thomas Schuetz, Scott Rigby (Weave/Flux)

Integration service for k6

k6 is a modern cloud native tool for performance testing. It would be nice to support it as a part of Keptn Quality Gates, similar to the existing JMeter or Lithmus Chaos integration services.

The scope could be to create a Keptn Sequence step for invoking k6 for doing performance testing against a developer/staging environment and evaluate the results of k6 Thresholds to make a decision on further promotion.

Additionally improvement could be that k6 send testing metrics to Prometheus in real-time to evaluate Service Level Indicators on Prometheus and decide the further promotion.

  • Areas to study/improve: Golang, k6, performance testing, Prometheus
  • Slack channel for technical discussion: #wg-k6-integrations
  • Project size: 175 hours
  • Difficulty: Easy/Medium
  • Potential mentor(s): Pepe Cano (k6)

Jenkins Pipeline Executor Service

Jenkins is widely used as a CI/CD automation tool. It integrates with Keptn through Jenkins Pipeline Library for Keptn or through the CloudEvents Plugin for Jenkins. It is also possible to trigger Jenkins REST APIs from the Job Executor Service. At the same time it would be great to have deeper integrations with Jenkins as a Pipeline Engine.

Potential deliverables:

  • New service that would support executing Jenkins Pipelines on a remote Jenkins instance. This service could also wait for completion and extract the executor results from there.
  • Executing Jenkins Pipelines right within Keptn’s execution plane so that there is no remote Jenkins instance. This feature would be based on Jenkinsfile Runner.

Summary:

  • Areas to study/improve: Golang, Java, Jenkins, Jenkins Pipelines
  • Slack channel for technical discussion: #keptn-integrations
  • Project size: 175 hours
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Potential mentor(s): Oleg Nenashev, Afzal Ansari

New Documentation site engine

Currently the Keptn documentation site is based on Markdown and Hugo. For tutorials, Codelabs is also used. While extremely handy for smaller projects and initial versions of Keptn, this toolchain have serious deficiencies for the larger scale projects like Keptn:

  • No documents aggregation from multiple repositories. It prevents the community from using the Documentation as Code approach when documentation is stored and modified along with production code in its repositories.
  • No support for versioning, so we do a lot of copy/paste to preserve old versions of the documentation. This also causes issues with external references from other docs that link into the documentation.
  • Current tools do not support shared text between different docs
  • Markdown’s xref’ing capabilities are weak 3:33
  • markdown’s support of inline comments is weak

We suggest using Antora that is specifically designed for managing documentation at scale and convert the documentation source to Asciidoctor. Antora provides limited support for Markdown source but markdown itself has deficiencies for a full documentation set. This project requires some migration automation, e.g. with help of Pandoc.

The scope of this project idea is to create the website engine, tooling and automation to enable the new documentation website. The project would be done in collaboration with the Keptn documentation contributors, and creating the documentation itself is NOT in the scope for the coding project.

Potential scope/deliverables:

  • Automation that builds the site from multiple repositories using Antora. It includes scripting, GitHub Actions, and automated configuration management.
  • GitHub workflows for continuous deployment of the website to Netlify and GitHub Pages
  • Nice2have: Implement previews for the website and support for staging changes (e.g. pre-release documentation).
  • Developer/Contributor documentation for the new engine, in collaboration with the documentation contributors.

Summary:

  • More info: keptn.github.io issues#994
  • Discussion channel: #keptn-docs
  • Areas to study/improve: JavaScript, Antora, Asciidoctor/Markdown, GitHub Actions, Pandoc, Netlify
  • Project size: 175 or 350 hours, depending on the scope
  • Difficulty: Easy/Medium
  • Potential mentor(s): Meg McRoberts, Oleg Nenashev, Suraj Banakar, Indermohan Singh

Interactive Katacoda Playground for keptn

Katacoda is an Interactive Learning and Training Platform for Software Engineers to help learn new technologies using real environments right in the browser. It helps empowering developers to learn the technologies such as Kubernetes, Machine Learning and cloud platforms using self-paced labs. It shares knowledge with customised content and labs to demonstrate internal tooling, patterns and practices.

We already have nice tutorials, you can find it from here keptn-tutorials But it lacks the real time scenarios, we can extend this tutorial to provide users with the consequences of the use cases from the keptn project in real environment through Katacoda Playground.

Potential use-cases that could be addressed in the project:

  • With the support of Katacoda platform, each tutorial of keptn can be created and visualised smoothly. It would be nice if various kubernetes clusters can be integrated in the playground e.g. k3s, k3d, etc.
  • Developer/Contributor playground for the keptn tutorial, in collaboration with the documentation/tutorial contributors.

Summary:

  • Areas to study/improve: Markdown, Shell Scripting, Kubernetes, Prometheus
  • Slack channel for technical discussion: #keptn-docs
  • Project size: 175 hours
  • Difficulty: Medium
  • Potential mentor(s): Oleg Nenashev, Afzal Ansari

References

Entity Custom Resource Definitions for Keptn GitOps

Integration for GitOps-based Deployment Tools (ArgoCD/Flux)

K6 Integration Service

New Documentation Site Engine

Last modified 2023-03-22: chore: improve documentation for better rendering (23b78ba)