Meet the Community – Pearl Dsilva

The Apache CloudStack Community is an ever-growing and rapidly-developed community of people all around the globe committed to open-source technology. We are a welcoming society for new contributors and people keen on technology. This blog series will present you with recent CloudStack Committers and PMC members. Learn more about our tech society!

Meet Pearl Dsilva – one of the CloudStack Committers. Learn more about her!

Introduce yourself with a few words?
Hi, I'm Pearl Dsilva, with about 5 years of experience in Telecommunications and Cloud Computing. I'm based in Bangalore, India, and currently work at ShapeBlue. I have done my Bachelor's Degree in Engineering in E&C. Since then, my career has been mainly in Telecommunications and Cloud management.
I am an avid reader who likes to devour fiction books and binge-watch series over weekends. Self-learning and self-motivation are the mantras that I follow to keep myself abreast with new things in our field of work. Never averse to taking a new role, responsibilities, and tasks that require reinventing myself.

Tell us your story in one Tweet.
An Electronics & Communications Engineer who developed an interest in networking and communications in distributed systems. Over the years, I've had the opportunity to work in cloud computing, network management, cloud automation, and orchestration. I would like to give credit to my first company, where I joined as a campus recruit for providing me guidance, training, and exposure in the related field. The mentors that I had played a massive role in skill development which has played a significant role in what I am today. All this led me to an opportunity to work on CloudStack and be a part of the community.

When did you start your CloudStack journey?
In November 2019, I started dabbling with CloudStack. It began as something that I did as part of my job. But as time passed by, I realised it was fun working on an open-source project. There are many ways to contribute and be involved, and the community members are helpful. And this journey goes on …

Who was your mentor during your CloudStack journey?
Rohit Yadav has been an absolute mentor right from day one. From helping me understand CloudStack to getting me around with how the community works, Rohit's always been there to help and support. He has been a great motivator, especially the role he played during the onboarding process. The learning by interacting with him and the other community members has been immense.

Which was the latest feature on which you contributed, or what was your last commitment to the CloudStack project?
Among the features I've worked on, the most recent ones include enabling automatic upgrades in CloudStack - without needing to register the SystemVM template prior to the upgrade, support for bulk actions in the UI, and custom Resource Icons support.

Why do people need to choose open-source technology?
Opensource software is agile and flexible, and the users can easily contribute or propose ideas that they intend to see in the project. Furthermore, it is backed by an involved community, which makes it a better option compared to proprietary software in many ways.