GSoC Ceph - 2020 Project Report
During Google Summer of Code 2020 I contributed to Ceph Dashboard. Ceph is an open-source software storage platform, implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster, and provides 3in1 interfaces for : object-, block- and file-level storage. Ceph Dashboard is the built-in web-based management application for the Ceph distributed storage project. It consists of a Python-based backend that runs as a Ceph Manager module and an Angular-based web frontend that communicates via the backend with a REST API.
Project: Ceph Dashboard UI Enhancement and Improved Community Branding
Ceph had a number of user interface improvements that are high on the “nice to have” side, but always fell behind due to other priorities, especially new features. My Google Summer of Code task was to implement some of these ideas and also documents these in a style guide. I was able to do the following tasks:
Work Done
| Task | Planned | Completed | Pull Request ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| A new Login Screen | Yes | Yes | 34079 |
| Make better use of Bootstrap responsive font sizes | Yes | Yes | 35354 |
| Use more bootstrap variables | Yes | Yes | 35225 |
| Use a unified quoting style across all UI elements | Yes | Yes | 35466 |
| Implement a style guide to give a the UI an overall look and feel | Yes | Ongoing | 36764 |
| Add button to copy the bootstrap token into the clipboard | No | Yes | 34294 |
| Clean up HTML | No | Yes | 34314 |
| Add scss linting test | No | Yes | 35615 |
| Fix autocomplete input backgrounds in chrome and firefox | No | Yes | 35676 |
| Remove password field if using SSO | No | Yes | 36312 |
| Display description on mouse hover | No | Ongoing | 35956 |
| Create new chapter about the Dashboard’s landing page | No | Yes | 36222 |
| Fix style that are being applied globally | No | Yes | 36865 |
Experience
My favorite part about participating in GSoC with Ceph was the diversity of people I interacted with. I had the opportunity of working with some of the great developers who guided and taught me a plethora of things. Ceph being an important open source project, my code would be used by hundreds of thousands of users all over the world which is really satisfying and encouraging. Most importantly I spent my entire summers doing something meaningful and kept myself engaged productively. The amount of experience I gained from working on the project is immeasurable. I learned a lot about frontend development, specifically Angular. The code reviews helped me learn writing properly formatted and good quality code.
I would like to thank my mentors Lenz Grimmer, Ernesto Puerta, Alfonso Martínez Hidalgo, Tiago Melo and the entire Ceph dashboard team for their constant guidance, code reviews, timely feedback and help. I would want to continue contributing to Ceph in future and give back to the community that has taught me so much.
I also express my gratitude to the people behind Google Summer of Code. I had a very enjoyable experience working in GSoC 2020.