I, Luciano Lo Giudice, apply for upload rights for Ceph

Contact Information

Who I am

I am a software engineer, currently working for the Storage team in Canonical since 2021. Beforehand, I've worked in various industries, such as telecommunications, embedded systems and machine learning.

My interests are varied, and range from low-level optimization, parallelism, high performant systems, distributed systems, real-time constraints, virtualization, open source software, among others.

I graduated with honors in Computer Engineering in the National University of La Matanza, an up and coming local university that has been gaining traction in the last couple of years. I'm based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I've lived most of my life.

My Ubuntu story

My first distro was Debian, back in 2006 when I became interested in hacking operating systems and found Windows too burdensome for that. I was instantly hooked, and began exploring the innards of Linux. It also proved extremely valuable for my academic and professional life, as Linux an extensive array of tools that allows programmers to really make use of the system.

I unfortunately ran into several driver-related issues in Debian so I began my search for a distro that worked "out of the box" for a set of more exotic hardware. The choice then became a contest between Linux Mint and Ubuntu, and I picked the latter, since I found it more compelling and with a much more welcoming community.

I then became a member of the wider Ubuntu community in 2009 and haven't looked back since. In addition to being a regular user of the bleeding edge releases, I've become acquainted with several packages, reported bugs and proposed fixes. I finally became a fully fledged member of Canonical in 2021, which felt like a natural progression of my personal story.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• Ceph-NVME charm. I designed and developed the ceph-nvme charm which allows users to bridge the modern NVMe-oF protocol with Ceph. I consider it a strong implementation due to the harmonious interaction of many different pieces (Ceph, SPDK, Linux drivers) and because of the advanced features it provides while being a relatively slim project.

• Monorepo migration. I was in charge of the migration for multiple independent repositories to a single monorepo for Canonical's Ceph charms. This included not just consolidating multiple repositories but also designing the CI subsystem, to make our tests run much more smoothly and being less brittle.

• Cinder charms. Shortly after joining Canonical, I was tasked with curating and revitalizing 2 Cinder charms that had been bit-rotting: Cinder LVM and Cinder Netapp. They both have gained usage ever since.

• Project Farsight. This was a proof of concept intended to make use of DPU's to accelerate Ceph and provide additional security guarantees. It involved a lot of exploration in areas that I wasn't really familiar with and yielded promising results.

Upload history

Available in the sponsorship miner. Most of the uploads are naturally related to Ceph:

Areas of work

• Canonical Ceph charms (ceph-mon, ceph-osd, ceph-radosgw, ceph-nvme, etc.)
• Microceph
• Storage-related charms (cinder-lvm, cinder-netapp)
• Performance regression testing and infrastructure for the storage team charms

Things I could do better

• I'd like to be more active on additional communication channels such as IRC and Matrix to better engage the community as a whole
• I tend to rush into a task before fully understanding its implications. This has happened with some SRUs in the past and I'd like to rectify that
• Ever since I've started the developer journey to gain upload rights, I'd like to thoroughly document the process so others can more easily pick it up

Plans for the future

• Continue work on Ceph charms, make them more performant and scalable
• Acquire expertise in storage-related topics, specifically regarding new technologies (SPDK, io-uring, BPF)
• Obtain upload rights, speed up SRU management for the team
• Become more involved in the overall open source community

What I like least in Ubuntu

• Documentation could be improved, there's vast amount of knowledge that only a few select people possess. The Ceph team of which I'm a part has taken steps to decentralize this knowledge
• Response times for bug reports could be improved - I'd like to work on a more streamlined process for this
• Repositories are too scattered: there's opendev, github, launchpad, etc. The Ceph team has adopted steps to consolidate these

Comments

If you'd like to comment, but are not the applicant or a sponsor, do it here. Don't forget to sign with @SIG@.

Endorsements

Bryce Harrington

General feedback

I've been mentoring Luciano for the past few months as he embarked on this journey towards PPU. While I have not sponsored his uploads, I have been involved in helping find good bugs to work on, and given preliminary packaging feedback. I've appreciated how well he takes direction, and how much thought he puts into his work. He has asked some good technical questions and tolerated (even appreciated!) my far too detailed dissertations on the topics.

In my mentor role, I've been encouraging him to stretch beyond Ceph to broaden his experience base. We've gone through SRUs, MIRs, and autopkgtest migration issues, to build on his existing packaging knowledge base.

I definitely feel his skill and experience levels are already sufficient for PPU, and he is on track building a solid set of sponsored uploads. I could easily see him continue on towards MOTU, if that's an area of interest for him, by continuing to take on packaging work broadly through the distro.

TEMPLATE

As a sponsor, just copy/paste the following template (without the curly braces) above of the === TEMPLATE === line and fill it out.

=== <SPONSORS NAME> ===
==== General feedback ====
## Please fill us in on your shared experience.
## (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality?
## How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

==== Specific Experiences of working together ====
## Please add good examples of your work together,
## but also cases that could have handled better.
##
## Full list of sponsored packages can be generated here:
## https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi

==== Areas of Improvement ====
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