My first open source project and Google Code-in

This is a guest post from a mentor with coala, an open source tool for linting and fixing code in many different languages, which participated in Google Code-in 2017.

About two years ago, my friend Gyan and I built a small web app which checked whether or not a given username was available on a few popular social media websites. The idea was simple: judge availability of the username on the basis of an HTTP response. Here’s a pseudo-code example:

website_url = form_website_url(website, username)
# Eg: form_website_url('github', 'manu-chroma') returns 'github.com/manu-chroma'

if website_url_response.http_code == 404:
  username available
else:
  username taken

Much to our delight, it worked! Well, almost. It had a lot of bugs but we didn’t care much at the time. It was my first Python project and the first time I open sourced my work. I always look back on it as a cool idea, proud that I made it and learned a lot in the process.

But the project had been abandoned until John from coala approached me. John suggested we use it for Google Code-in because one of coala’s tasks for the students was to create accounts on a few common coding related websites. Students could use the username availability tool to find a good single username–people like their usernames to be consistent across websites–and coala could use it to verify that the accounts were created.

I had submitted a few patches to coala in the past, so this sounded good to me! The competition clashed with my vacation plans, but I wanted to get involved, so I took the opportunity to become a mentor.

Over the course of the program, students not only used the username availability tool but they also began making major improvements. We took the cue and began adding tasks specifically about the tool. Here are just a few of the things students added:

• Regex to determine whether a given username was valid for any given website
• More websites, bringing it to a total of 13
• Tests (!)

The web app is online so you can check username availability too!

I had such a fun time working with students in Google Code-in, their enthusiasm and energy was amazing. Special thanks to students Andrew, Nalin, Joshua, and biscuitsnake for all the time and effort you put into the project. You did really useful work and I hope you learned from the experience!

I want to thank John for approaching me in the first place and suggesting we use and improve the project. He was an unstoppable force throughout the competition, helping both students and fellow mentors. John even helped me with code reviews to really refine the work students submitted, and help them improve based on the feedback.

Kudos to the Google Open Source team for organizing it so well and lowering the barriers of entry to open source for high school students around the world.

By Manvendra Singh, coala mentor

A galactic experience in Google Code-in 2017

This is a guest post from Liquid Galaxy, one of the organizations that participated in both Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in 2017.

Liquid Galaxy, an open source project that powers panoramic views spanning multiple computers and displays, has been participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) since 2011. However, we never applied to participate in Google Code-in (GCI) because we heard stories from other projects about long hours and interrupted holidays in service of mentoring eager young students.

That changed in 2017! And, while the stories are true, we have to say it’s also an amazing and worthwhile experience.

It was hard for our small project to recruit the number of mentors needed. Thankfully, our GSoC mentors stepped up, as did many former GSoC students. We even had forward thinking students who were interested in participating in GSoC 2018 volunteer to mentor! While it was challenging, our team of mentors helped us have a nearly flawless GCI experience.

The Google Open Source team only had to nudge us once, when a student’s task had been pending review for more than 36 hours. We’re pretty happy with that considering we had nearly 500 tasks completed over the 50 days of the contest.

More important than our experience, though, is the student experience. We learned a lot, seeing how they chose tasks, the attention to detail some of them put into their work, and the level of interaction between the students and the mentors. Considering these were young students, ranging in age from 13 to 17, they far exceeded our expectations.

There was one piece of advice the Google Open Source team gave us that we didn’t understand as GCI newbies: have a large number of tasks ready from day one, and leave some unpublished until the halfway point. That ended up being key, it ensured we had enough tasks for the initial flood of students and some in reserve for the second flood around the holidays. Our team of mentors worked hard from the moment we were accepted into GCI to the moment we began to create over 150 tasks in five different categories. Students seemed to think we did a good job and told us they enjoyed the variety of tasks and level of difficulty.

We’re glad we finally participated in Google Code-in and we’ll definitely be applying next time! You can learn more about the project and the students who worked with us on our blog.

By Andreu Ibáñez, Liquid Galaxy org admin

Cloudprober: open source black-box monitoring software

Ever wonder if users can actually access your microservices? Observe timeouts in your applications, and not sure if it's the network or if your servers are too busy? Curious about the 99%-ile network latency between your on-premise data center and services running in the cloud?

Cloudprober, which we open sourced last year, answers questions like these and more. It’s black-box monitoring software that "probes" your systems and services and generates metrics based on probe results. This kind of monitoring strategy doesn’t make assumptions about how your service is implemented and it works at the same layer as your service’s users. You can make changes to your service’s implementation with peace of mind, knowing you’ll notice if a change prevents users from accessing the service.

A probe can be anything: a ping, an HTTP request, or even a custom program that mimics how your services are consumed (for example, creating and accessing a blog post). Cloudprober builds and exports standard metrics, and provides a way to easily integrate them with your existing monitoring stack, such as Prometheus-Grafana, Stackdriver and soon InfluxDB. Cloudprober is written in Go and works on all major platforms: Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. It's released as a static binary as well as a Docker image.

Here’s an example probe config that runs an HTTP probe against your forwarding rules and exports data to Stackdriver and Prometheus:

probe {
  name: "internal-web"
  type: HTTP
  # Probe all forwarding rules that contain web-fr in their name.
  targets {
    gce_targets {
      forwarding_rules {}
    }
    regex: "web-fr-.*"
  }
  interval_msec: 5000
  timeout_msec: 1000
  http_probe {
    port: 8080
  }
}

// Export data to stackdriver
surfacer {
  type: STACKDRIVER
}

// Prometheus exporter
surfacer {
  type: PROMETHEUS
}

The probe config is run like this from the command-line:

./cloudprober --config_file $HOME/cloudprober/cloudprober.cfg

This example probe config highlights two major features of Cloudprober: automatic, continuous discovery of cloud targets, and data export over multiple channels (Stackdriver and Prometheus in this case). Cloud deployments are dynamic and are often changing constantly. Cloudprober's dynamic target discovery feature ensures you have one less thing to worry about when doing minor infrastructure changes. Data export in various formats helps it integrate well with your existing monitoring setup.

Other features include:

• Go text templates based configuration which adds programming capability to configs, such as "for" loops and conditionals
• Fast and efficient implementation of core probe types
• Custom probes through the "external" probe type
• The ability to read config through metadata
• And cloud (Stackdriver) logging

Though most of the cloud support is specific to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it’s easy to add support for other providers. Cloudprober has an extensible architecture so you can add new types of targets, probes and monitoring backends.

Cloudprober was built by the Cloud Networking Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at Google to monitor network availability and associated features. Today, it's used by several other Google Cloud SRE teams as well.

We’re excited to share Cloudprober with the wider devops community! You can find more examples in the GitHub repository and more information on the project website.

By Manu Garg, Cloud Networking Team