I had the opportunity to get selected for Google Summer of Code on the freshman year itself in my academic life. The experience I gained in that summer working with SilverStripe project boosted my self confidence and helped me immensely to shape up my career.
This year, which happens to be my final year as an undergraduate, I'm going to get yet another stint with Summer of Code. This time, it's with OpenNebula. OpenNebula is an Open Source toolkit for cloud computing. This project is relatively young and small, but something which could make a great impact for the future. In simple terms, OpenNebula lets you run your own cloud hosting service like Amazon EC2.
As a developer, who makes use of cloud platforms, I really want to see open standards getting adopted among cloud service providers. Vendor lock-in is the biggest threat I see when moving to cloud based platforms. Projects such as OpenNebula are great initiatives to avoid this. OpenNebula is also one of the main supporters for the OCCI standard interface. I have been following their developments closely, from the first day I got to know about them.
When I saw OpenNebula has been selected as a mentoring organization for the first time in this year's GSOC, I thought this would be a great chance for me to contribute to them. Another interesting thing about OpenNebula is they use Ruby as their main development language.
In this summer, I will work on building a web based administration console for OpenNebula. I believe it will make OpenNebula more usable and increase its adoption. It would be something similar to AWS(Amazon Web Service) management console, but more rich in terms of the capabilities.
Though, we are still in the brain-storming phase of the project, I could give a small hint that we would be using Sinatra and other Rack middleware to build this. So it's yet another chance to show the power and flexibility of micro-frameworks. I will be sharing my experiences during the project via this blog. I hope it would be really fun and exciting.
Finally, big shout-out goes to my mentor, Jaime Melis, who was very supportive from the time of preparing the proposal. It's always a pleasure to work with someone like him, who is really passionate and knowledgeable.
If you are interested in reading my full project proposal : http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AeUIyatONYiTZGY3ZnYyZmNfNjljanJyZDNjNg&hl=en