My One Month Open Source Bootcamp at Ortelius #ContributhonbySCA
Introduction
I enrolled for the #ContributhonbySCA Bootcamp and I got in. SheCodeAfrica gave me the opportunity to work with and learn from people from around the world.
The one month I have spent with the Ortelius team of Deployhub has been absolutely delightful.
When I got the mail that I had made it into the Contributhon program and I saw the project description, I felt intimidated and wondered if SheCodeAfrica had made a mistake because I am a data scientist and the Ortelius project is about microservices (I had never heard about them at that point).
We had the onboarding call on the 1st of April where I met Steve, Sacha and Ayesha, and Munnie. I immediately knew I was joining a chill team with brilliant minds, and they reassured us that they would guide us every step of the way.
Characters in my story
- Munnie (Bootcamp colleague)
- Steve Taylor (CTO at Deployhub and Bootcamp Mentor)
- Sacha Wharton (Bootcamp Mentor)
- Tracy Ragan (CEO Deployhub)
About Ortelius
Ortelius is a microservice management platform that versions and tracks microservices, their blast radius, and inventory across clusters providing a proactive view of your microservice architecture as it changes over time.
Ortelius is an incubating project under the governance of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (Linux Foundation).
The mission at Ortelius is to simplify the adoption of modern architecture through a world-class microservice management platform driven by a supportive and diverse global open source community.
Tracy wrote something about Ortelius here.
What is a Microservice?
Microservices — also known as the microservice architecture — is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are
- Highly maintainable and testable
- Loosely coupled
- Independently deployable
- Organized around business capabilities
- Owned by a small team
The microservice architecture enables the rapid, frequent and reliable delivery of large, complex applications. It also enables an organization to evolve its technology stack.
My Contribution to Ortelius
I will list all the tasks I worked on in the last month and explain them.
- The first task was creating a python flask app that uses the bubble sort algorithm to sort an array and returns a JSON string. This was a fairly easy task. I got help with creating the flask app and got an introduction to ‘endpoints’. PR
- We were then asked to dockerize and add a helm chart to the flask app. The docker bit was also quite straightforward, but the helm chart was a totally different story. This was where it started getting really interesting. The helm chart step involved Minikube, Kubernetes, and Helm, I had no idea what I needed to do and youtube was no help. I was eventually able to complete this with Steve’s, Sacha’s, and Munnie’s help and it turned out to be a pretty straightforward process. PR
3. The third and current task involves Adding SQL queries to track component dependencies in the microservice using Flask App and I got help from a friend with setting up the PostgreSQL database. PR
The first two tasks were created just to get us comfortable with the organization’s environment and Kubernetes.
PS: All my pull requests were merged 🚀🚀🚀🚀
Another thing of note is how the mentors created time for us, we would literally just send a message and they would take the time to help with the issue, they also gave us (Munnie and I) a speaking engagement in the upcoming Ortelius Microservice Visionaries 2021 (May 20th celebration) which shows just how much they carry us along and make us feel like a part of the team, and Tracy has continued to give us resources to prepare our presentation.
Challenges and Recommendations
Understanding exactly what the project was about was very challenging for me. Microservices is still a new concept to me and I struggled with finding reliable answers to my questions online.
A Simpler project brief that breaks down the project in the simplest of terms should be made available to contributors at the beginning.
Next Steps
I am currently preparing for my presentation at the May 20th Celebration and considering staying on with the team. I will also continue looking for open source data science projects.
