Storage Engineering Internship
About Me
My name is Kei Akiyama, and I am a first-year master’s student at the University of Tsukuba. I am particularly interested in systems programming, which I explore both in my graduate research and in my personal projects. I also enjoy working with Rust, and I actively contribute to improving the ecosystem through work on toolchains such as compilers and linkers.
What I Worked On During the Internship
During the internship, I worked on improving the performance of a distributed file system written in Rust and developed in-house at PFN by increasing its level of parallelism. In addition, I implemented a custom CSI (Container Storage Interface) driver required to run this file system on Kubernetes. These tasks were largely independent, allowing me to work on them in parallel to some extent. At the same time, since the internship period was relatively short at two weeks, having a well-structured plan was helpful, so I made a conscious effort to set concrete daily goals and steadily make progress throughout the internship.
What My Days Looked Like During the Internship
A typical day started with arriving at the office around 9:00 and having a brief discussion with my mentor about implementation strategies, experiments, and validation approaches. Throughout the day, I worked on improving the quality of my implementation through code reviews and discussions using whiteboards in the office. At the end of the day, I summarized my progress in a daily report on Slack and finished work around 18:00.
Why I Applied for the Internship
I had already recognized PFN as an organization that takes on technically ambitious challenges across a wide range of domains. I was interested in experiencing what it would be like to do engineering in such an environment, which motivated me to apply.
What I Gained from the Internship
In particular, when implementing the CSI driver, I first needed to understand the CSI specification itself. Since there were very few existing implementations in Rust, I had to develop a comprehensive solution while taking into account the characteristics of the target file system. Through this process, I learned how to approach investigation, measurement, and implementation effectively—specifically, where to focus my efforts in order to make meaningful progress.
Who Should Apply?
In addition to technical growth, PFN provides multiple opportunities to interact not only with members of your own team but also with employees from other teams and fellow interns. This makes it an environment where you can build valuable connections with people from diverse areas of expertise. If you are interested in exploring computer science in such an environment, I believe you will find the PFN internship especially rewarding.
