Google Summer of Code 2025 is here!

Level up your coding skills in Google Summer of Code 2025

Get ready for the 2025 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program! We started this adventure in 2005 and over the past 20 years we have welcomed over 21,000 new contributors to open source through the program under the guidance of 20,000+ mentors from over 1,000 open source organizations. Check out the video below to learn more about the impact GSoC has made over the last two decades.

Our mission since day one has been to foster the next generation of open source contributors. Participants are immersed in a supportive environment where they spend 3+ months collaborating on real-world projects alongside experienced mentors. This deep dive into open source not only builds valuable coding skills, but cultivates a strong understanding of community dynamics and best practices, empowering them to become impactful contributors.

2024 was a milestone year with 1,127 GSoC contributors completing their projects with 195 open source organizations. We hope to surpass these numbers in 2025!

Be a GSoC 2025 mentoring organization

Application period: January 27 – Feb 11

Interested organizations can learn more by visiting our website; there you’ll find supportive materials to get started.

An invaluable resource is our Mentor Guide, which is a quick way to familiarize yourself with the GSoC program. You’ll find tips on how to engage your community, suggestions on how to present achievable project ideas, and guidance on applying these to your communities.

We are happy to welcome organizations new to GSoC each year. Typically, 20-30 organizations join us for the first time, and we encourage you to apply. In 2025, we're particularly excited to expand our reach in the Security and Machine Learning domains.

Learn more about being a GSoC mentoring organization

Join us in our first information session of the year:

• Organization Applications Tips on Tuesday, January 22 17:00 UTC

  Join the talk here: meet.google.com/gse-thow-xmc

Be a GSoC 2025 contributor

Application period: March 24 - April 8

If you are a beginner to open source development or a student interested in learning about open source, this is your chance to get involved and gain experience on real-world software development projects. Follow these quick steps to set yourself up for success:

• Learn more about GSoC on our official website.
• Watch our Introduction to GSoC video for a quick overview of the program.
• Review the Contributor Guide to get insightful ideas from past students and mentors for your program success.
• Read the GSoC Program rules to understand how GSoC works.

Learn more about being a GSoC contributor

Join one of our upcoming information sessions:

• Contributor Talk #1 on Wednesday, February 19, 16:00 UTC

  Join the talk here: meet.google.com/oct-wgna-paa

• Contributor Talk #2 on Tuesday, February 25, 2:00 UTC

  Join the talk here: meet.google.com/zau-gtwk-tif

• Contributor Talk #3 on Thursday, March 6, 16:00 UTC

 Join the talk here: meet.google.com/gyq-mcuz-wey

Please help us spread the word about GSoC 2025 to your peers, family members, colleagues, universities and anyone interested in making a difference in the open source community. Join us and help shape the future of open source!

By Stephanie Taylor, Mary Radomile, and Lucila Ortiz

Kubernetes 1.32 is now available on GKE

Kubernetes 1.32 is now available in the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Rapid Channel, just one week after the OSS release! For more information about the content of Kubernetes 1.32, read the official Kubernetes 1.32 Release Notes and the specific GKE 1.32 Release Notes.

This release consists of 44 enhancements. Of those enhancements, 13 have graduated to Stable, 12 are entering Beta, and 19 have graduated to Alpha.

Kubernetes 1.32: Key Features

Dynamic Resource Allocation graduated to beta

• Dynamic Resource Allocation graduated to beta, enabling advanced selection, configuration, scheduling and sharing of accelerators and other devices. As a beta API, using it in GKE clusters requires opt-in. You must also deploy a DRA-compatible kubelet plugin for your devices and use the DRA API instead of the traditional extended resource API used for the existing Device Plugin.

Support for more efficient API streaming

• The Streaming lists operation has graduated to beta and is enabled by default; the new operation supplies the initial list needed by the list + watch data access pattern over a watch stream and improves kube-apiserver stability and resource usage by enabling informers to receive a continuous data stream. See k8s blog for more information.

Recovery from volume expansion failure

• Support for recovery from volume expansion failure graduated to beta and is enabled by default. If a user initiates an invalid volume resize, for example by specifying a new size that is too big to be satisfied by the underlying storage system, expansion of PVC will continuously be retried and fail. With this new feature, such a PVC can now be edited to request a smaller size to unblock the PVC. The PVC can be monitored by watching .status.allocatedResourceStatuses and events on the PVC.

Job API for management by external controllers

• Support in the Job API for the managed-by mechanism graduated to beta and is enabled by default. This enables integration with external controllers like MultiKueue.

Improved scheduling performance

• The Kubernetes QueueingHint feature enhances scheduling throughput by preventing unnecessary scheduling retries. It’s achieved by allowing scheduler plugins to provide per-plugin callback functions that make efficient requeuing decisions.

Acknowledgements

As always, we want to thank all the Googlers that provide their time, passion, talent and leadership to keep making Kubernetes the best container orchestration platform. We would like to mention especially Googlers who helped drive the features mentioned in this blog [John Belamaric, Wojciech Tyczyński, Michelle Au, Matthew Cary, Aldo Culquicondor, Tim Hockin Maciej Skoczeń Michał Woźniak] and the Googlers who helped bring 1.32 to GKE in record time.

By Federico Bongiovanni, Benjamin Elder, and Sen Lu – Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Season of Docs announces results of 2024 program

Google Season of Docs is happy to announce the 2024 program results, including the project case studies.

Google Season of Docs is a grant-based program where open source organizations apply for US$5-15,000 to hire technical writers to complete documentation projects. At the end of the six-month documentation development phase, organizations submit a case study to outline the problems their documentation project was intended to solve, how they are measuring the success of their documentation project, and what they learned during the project. The case studies are publicly available and are intended to help other open source organizations learn best practices in open source documentation.

The 2024 Google Season of Docs documentation development phase began on April 10 and ended November 22, 2024. Participants in the 2024 program will also answer three followup surveys in 2025, in order to better track the impact of these documentation projects over time.

Key Takeaways from 2024 Google Season of Docs

Eleven different organizations participated in the 2024 program. These organizations represented a variety of open source project types, including databases, AI/ML, cloud infrastructure, programming languages, and science and medicine. The documentation projects hoped to address a variety of different problems. The most common challenges addressed by the Season of Docs projects were:

• Project documentation disorganized
• Potential project users having difficulty installing, using, or integrating your project
• Project documentation outdated
• Project documentation needs to be converted to a different tool, platform, or format
• Potential contributors having difficulty onboarding to your project
• Project documentation lacking for a specific key use case
• Potential project users lack fundamental understanding of the project domain

Program participants learned a lot from their projects. These lessons are detailed in the published case studies, to help other open source organizations who are interested in taking on their own documentation projects. Some highlights include:

“Putting time and effort into your project’s infrastructure, such as communication channels and onboarding processes, is really valuable work."

– CO2.js project

“Perhaps the key piece of advice that we came away with that could be useful for other projects is to be flexible in what you set out to accomplish: what looks like the top-five items on the to-do list on day one may not be what you think is the most important at the end."

– FontTools project

“This particular experiment with a different medium has turned out to be successful and we encourage other communities to also explore different media depending on their audience and information needs."

– Numpy project

“Developing documentation also helped us identify ambiguities in the interface and other areas of the site design or features that needed refinement or decisions made in order to document them properly. Now, with a base site and well-established documentation workflow, we are documenting more features as they are developed."

– R-Universe project

Take a look at the participant list to see the initial project plans and case studies for all of the participating projects!

What’s next?

Stay tuned for information about Google Season of Docs 2025 – watch for posts on this blog and sign up for the announcements email list.

By Elena Spitzer and Erin McKean, Google Open Source Programs Office