5 DevOps Hacktoberfest Projects to Contribute to!

It is Hacktoberfest 2024! Time to brush up your DevOps skills and get those pull requests in!

Here are 5 DevOps projects you can contribute to during Hacktoberfest 2024. Most of them are written in Go, but there are usually some issues that are not Go related. Get your beer (optional) and pretzels (non-negotiable) ready and start coding!

(This is you after you get hired because of all the PRs you did during Hacktoberfest)

Grafana Loki

Grafana Loki is basically like Prometheus, but for logs. It is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to store and query logs from multiple sources, making it ideal for use in microservices architectures.

Loki has an eye-watering number of open issues (1545 😭) so there is plenty of room for contributions.

If you filter for "good first issue" (here are the open ones), there are 12 issues to choose from. That should already be enough to get you started, but I think there will be more coming in the next few days :)

Containerd

Containers are everywhere, and containerd is one of the standards for container runtimes. It is a container runtime that is designed to be simple, secure, and efficient. It is used to run containers in a containerized environment, and it is the runtime for Docker!

Containered is literally in everything you touch and pretty awesome, even awesomer that they join Hacktoberfest!

They have over 550 open issues and label by areas, such as client, distribution, etc. So you can pick something that interests you without going through a huge list. They also separate between bugs, documentation, and feature requests and more. I'm sure that you can find something to work on!

Grafana K6

Grafana K6 is another Grafana project that is looking for help. K6 is an open-source, distributed, and load testing tool that allows you to test the performance of your web applications in a scalable and realistic way.

K6 currently has 360 open issues, of that 14 are labeled "good first issue".

Check it out! Very cool project in my opinion.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a leading open-source monitoring system that is widely used in the DevOps community. It is designed to collect, store, and query metrics from various sources, making it an essential tool for monitoring and alerting. Super cool, A LOT of companies use it. We use it at sliplane.io very extensively, so it must be cool ;).

Although there are only 3 open issues labeled "good first issue", there are 90 more issues labeled "help wanted". I'm sure you can find something to work on!

Watchtower

WatchTower is one of my favorite projects because it is super useful, and it was also my start in DevOps. WatchTower is a containerized application that monitors your running containers, and will automatically update your images when a newer version is available. Pretty simple, but super useful if you want to run your own infrastructure. Awesome learning experience, and it has over 18k stars!

The awesome thing about Watchtower is that they label their issues very well, with status, type, and priority. Just pick something, make a comment saying you want to work on it, and you are good to go!

Bonus: Go Github API

I wasn't sure if this counts as DevOps, but often times DevOps is about automating stuff and gluing things together.

Go Github API is a library for accessing the Github API in Go. It is a very popular project with over 10k stars.

It currently has over 70 open issues, of that 3 are labeled "good first issue". Not a lot, but you could be one of 3 people contributing to a Google project. That must look good on a CV, right? Get hacking!

Check it out!

Conclusion

Without Open Source, most things that exist today would not exist. It is a huge value add that so many projects are maintained by a community of developers. I hope you found some interesting projects to contribute to, and I hope you learned something new!

Happy hacking!

Cheers,

Jonas, Co-Founder at sliplane.io