Wrapping up Google Code-in 2018

We are excited to announce the conclusion of the 9th annual Google Code-in (GCI), our global online contest introducing teenagers to the world of open source development. Over the years the contest has not only grown bigger, but also helped find and support talented young people around the world.

Here are some initial statistics about this year’s program:

• Total number of students completing tasks: 3,123*
• Total number of countries represented by students: 77
• Percentage of girls among students: 17.9% 

Below you can see the total number of tasks completed by students year over year:

*These numbers will increase as mentors finish reviewing the final work submitted by students this morning.

Mentors from each of the 27 open source organizations are now busy reviewing the last  work submitted by participants. We look forward to sharing more statistics about the program, including countries and schools with the most student participants, in an upcoming blog post.

The mentors for each organization will spend the next couple of weeks selecting four Finalists (who will receive a hoodie too!) and their two Grand Prize Winners. Grand Prize Winners will be flown to Northern California to visit Google’s headquarters, enjoy a day of adventure in San Francisco, meet their mentors and hear talks from Google engineers.

Hearty congratulations to all the student participants for challenging themselves and making contributions to open source in the process!

Further, we’d like to thank the mentors and the organization administrators for GCI 2018. They are the heart of this program, volunteering countless hours creating tasks, reviewing student work, and helping bring students into the world of open source. Mentors teach young students about the many facets of open source development, from community standards and communicating across time zones to version control and testing. We couldn’t run this program without you! Thank you!

Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing the Grand Prize Winners and Finalists on January 7, 2019!

By Saranya Sampat, Google Open Source

Knative momentum continues, hits another adoption milestone

Released just four months ago by Google Cloud in collaboration with several vendors, Knative, an open source platform based on Kubernetes which provides the building blocks for serverless workloads, has already gained broad support.

The number of contributors has doubled, more than a dozen companies have contributed each month, and community contributions have increased over 45% since the 0.1 release. It’s an encouraging signal that validates the need for such a project, and suggests that ongoing development will be driven by healthy discussions among users and contributors.

Knative 0.2 Release 

In recent 0.2 release, the first major release since the project’s launch in July, we incorporated 323 pull requests from eight different companies. Knative 0.2 added a new Eventing resource model to complement the Serving and Build components. There were also lots of improvements under-the-hood, such as the implementation of pluggable routing and better support for autoscaling.

KubeCon North America

Continuing the theme, there are 10 sessions about Knative by speakers from seven different companies this week at KubeCon in Seattle. The sessions cover a variety of topics spanning from introductory overview sessions to advanced autoscaler customization. The number of companies represented by speakers illustrates the breadth of the growing Knative community.

Growing Ecosystem 

Another sign of Knative’s momentum is the growing ecosystem. A number of enterprise platform developers have begun using Knative to create serverless solutions on Kubernetes for their own hybrid cloud use-cases. Their use of the Knative API makes for a consistent developer experience and enables workload portability. For example, Pivotal, a top contributor to the Knative project, has adopted Knative alongside Kubernetes which helps them dedicate more resources higher in the stack:

"Since the release of Knative, we've been collaborating on an open functions platform to help companies run their new workloads on every cloud. That’s why we’re excited to launch the alpha of Pivotal Function Service." – Onsi Fakhouri, SVP of Engineering at Pivotal

Similarly, TriggerMesh has launched a hosted serverless management platform that runs on top of Knative, enabling developers to deploy and manage their functions from a central console.

"Knative provides us with the critical building blocks we need to create our serverless management platform." – Sebastien Goasguen, Co-founder, TriggerMesh

We’re excited by the speed with which Knative is being adopted and the broad cross section of the industry that is already contributing to the project. If you haven’t already jumped in, we invite you to get involved! Come visit github.com/knative and join the growing Knative community.

By Mark Chmarny, Knative Team

Google joins the OpenChain Project for license compliance

Google is thrilled to announce that we are joining the OpenChain Project as Platinum Members. OpenChain is an effort to make open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. We will also join the OpenChain board and are excited that Facebook and Uber will be fellow board members.

Over the last 14 years, the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) at Google has developed rigorous policies and processes so that we can do open source license compliance correctly, and at scale. This helps us use free and open source software extensively across the company and makes it easier to upstream our work. For us, it’s a matter of legal compliance as well as showing respect for the amazing communities that create and maintain the software.

Until now, there’s been no commonly accepted standard for open source compliance within an organization. Most organizations, like Google, have had to invent and cobble together policies and processes, occasionally comparing notes and hoping we haven’t forgotten anything.

The OpenChain Project is changing that by defining the core requirements of a quality compliance program and developing curriculum to help with training and management. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this work now that open source is a critical input at every step in the supply chain, both in hardware and software.

Google believes in this mission and is excited for the opportunity to use what we’ve learned to pave the way for the rest of the industry. We can help guide the development of standards that are rigorous, clear, and easy to follow for companies both large and small.

By Max Sills and Josh Simmons, Google Open Source