A Running Start

This is the blog that explains my ups and downs in the past three weeks on my Outreachy Internship.
It has been a very fruitful time with lots of learning. Before I begin to dive into the technical details, let me give some background of my project.

My project is with OpenStack, a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing.                                  The initial phase of my Outreachy internship has been very engrossing and motivating.

My project is with the Ironic community of OpenStack. The title of my project is -
IMPROVE IRONIC AGENT IMAGE BUILDER

Diving into the technical details, my project aims at improving the ironic agent image builder.
The OpenStack/ironic project has the "agent" part which runs inside the baremetal machine being deployed. To boot the agent it needs to embed it into a bootable Linux image. To automate the image building process ironic has conceived the ironic-python-agent-builder tool.  In simple words, ironic-python-agent-builder is a part of ironic-python-agent (or IPA) that contains tools and scripts to build deployment, cleaning or inspection ramdisk based on Ironic Python Agent.
The ironic-python-agent (or IPA) is a project of Ironic community where IPA is an agent for controlling and deploying Ironic controlled baremetal nodes. IPA works with the agent driver in
Ironic to provision the node.

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MY INITIAL TASKS & CHALLENGES

My first task was to understand about IPA and ironic-python-agent-builder. This was a theoretical and easy part. The next thing was understanding the existing image building tools of ironic-python-agent-builder. TinyIPA is a building code in IPA. I had to understand and build an image using TinyIPA and then work on how to move this TinyIPA building code from IPA to ironic-python-agent-builder. My mentor guided me through this process. Building an image was an easy task using simple commands.

    The main challenge was how to make the image build once I copy it to ironic-python-agent-builder. After copying the TinyIPA building code, I tried to build the image in the same way as I did in IPA. It showed many errors which were expected. I struggled in figuring out the root cause of the errors. After knowing the cause of errors, there could have been many ways to rectify the errors and I was kind of confused at this stage. I simply sought help from my mentors, asked them and followed the conclusion of our discussions. I tried to figure out things but after some threshold, it is always beneficial to ask for help and guidance so that you do not end up wasting a lot of time but instead invest the same time in working on the future steps. This was the lesson I learned during my very initial tasks. 

It is okay to get stuck, it is okay to struggle but what matters is how one gets through it, how one interprets it and how one moves ahead. 

Keep reading to get to know more about my struggles and lessons from Outreachy journey!