As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.
KubeCon showed Kubernetes is big, but is it a Unicorn?
It’s hard to remember now but there was a time when Kubernetes was a distant No. 3 in terms of container orchestrators being used in the market. It’s also eye opening to now realize that the firms that hatched the two platforms that towered over Kubernetes have had to completely re-jigger their business models under the Kubernetes onslaught.
And full credit to the CNCF for attempting to diffuse some of that attention from Kubernetes by spending the vast majority of the KubeCon opening keynote address touting some of the nearly two dozen graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects it also hosts. But, it was really the Big K that stole the show.
The impact: Open source is way more than the source code; governance is a big deal and can be the difference between longevity and irrelevance. Gathering, organizing, and maintaining humans is an entirely different skill set than doing the same for bits, but can have just as big an influence on the success of a project.
Report: Kubernetes use on the rise
At the same time, the Datadog report notes that container churn rates are approximately 10 times higher in orchestrated environments. Churn rates in container environments that lack an orchestration platform such as Kubernetes have increased in the last year as well. The average container lifespan at a typical company running infrastructure without orchestration is about two days, down from about six days in mid-2018. In 19% of those environments not running orchestration, the average container lifetime exceeded 30 days. That compares to only 3% of organizations running containers longer than 30 days in Kubernetes environments, according to the report’s findings.
The impact: If your containers aren't churning, you're probably not getting the full benefit of the technology you've adopted.
Upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel improves live patching, scheduling
A new WFX Wi-Fi driver for the Silicon Labs WF200 ASIC transceiver is coming to Linux kernel 5.5. This particular wireless transceiver is geared toward low-power IoT devices and uses a 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n radio optimized for low power RF performance in crowded RF environments. This new driver can interface via both Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) and Secure Digital Input Output (SDIO).
The impact: The kernel's continued relevance is a direct result of the never-ending grind to keep being where people need it to be (i.e. basically everywhere).
DigitalOcean Currents: December 2019
In that spirit, this fall’s installment of our seasonal Currents report is dedicated to open source for the second year running. We surveyed more than 5800 developers around the world on the overall health and direction of the open source community. When we last checked in with the community in 2018, more than half of developers reported contributing to open source projects, and most felt the community was healthy and growing.
The impact: While the good news outweighs the bad, there are a couple of things to keep an eye on: namely, making open source more inclusive and mitigating potential negative impact of big money.
I hope you enjoyed this list of what stood out to me from last week and come back next Monday for more open source community, market, and industry trends.
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