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.
Working on Linux's nuts and bolts at Linux Plumbers
The Kernel Maintainers Summit, Linux creator Linus Torvalds told me, is an invitation-only gathering of the top Linux kernel developers. But, while you might think it's about planning on the Linux kernel's future, that's not the case. "The maintainer summit is really different because it doesn't even talk about technical issues." Instead, "It's all about the process of creating and maintaining the Linux kernel."
The impact: This is like the technical version of the Bilderberg meeting: you can have your flashy buzzword conferences, but we'll be over here making the real decisions. Or so I imagine. Probably less private jets involved though.
Microsoft hosts first Windows Subsystem for Linux conference
Hayden Barnes, founder of Whitewater Foundry, a startup focusing on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) announced WSLconf 1, the first community conference for WSL. This event will be held on March 10-11, 2020 at Building 20 on the Microsoft HQ campus in Redmond, WA. The conference is still coming together. But we already know it will have presentations and workshops from Pengwin, Whitewater's Linux for Windows, Microsoft WSL, and Canonical's Ubuntu on WSL developers.
The impact: Microsoft is nurturing the seeds of community growing up around its increasing adoption of and contribution to open source software. It's enough to bring a tear to my eye.
Introducing Appwrite: An open source backend server for mobile and web developers
Appwrite is a new open source, end to end backend server for frontend and mobile developers that allows you to build apps a lot faster. Appwrite goal is to abstract and simplify common development tasks behind REST APIs and tools, to help developers build advanced apps way faster.
In this post I will shortly cover some of the main Appwrite services and explain about their main features and how they are designed to help you build your next project way faster than you would when writing all your backend APIs from scratch.
The impact: Software development is getting more and more accessible as more open source middleware gets easier to use. Appwrite claims to reduce the time and cost of development by 70%. Imagine what that would mean to a small mobile development agency or citizen developer. I'm curious about how they'll monetize this.
AGL (agile government leadership) is providing a valuable support network for people who are helping government work better for the public. The organization is focused on things that I am very passionate about — DevOps, digital transformation, open source, and similar topics that are top-of-mind for many government IT leaders. AGL provides me with a community to learn about what the best and brightest are doing today, and share those learnings with my peers throughout the industry.
The impact: It is easy to be cynical about the government no matter your political persuasion. I found it refreshing to have a reminder that the government is comprised of real people who are mostly doing their best to apply relevant technology to the public good. Especially when that technology is open source!
How Bloomberg achieves close to 90-95% hardware utilization with Kubernetes
In 2016, Bloomberg adopted Kubernetes—when it was still in alpha—and has seen remarkable results ever since using the project’s upstream code. “With Kubernetes, we’re able to very efficiently use our hardware to the point where we can get close to 90 to 95% utilization rates,” says Rybka. Autoscaling in Kubernetes allows the system to meet demands much faster. Furthermore, Kubernetes “offered us the ability to standardize our approach to how we build and manage services, which means that we can spend more time focused on actually working on the open source tools that we support,” says Steven Bower, Data and Analytics Infrastructure Lead. “If we want to stand up a new cluster in another location in the world, it’s really very straightforward to do that. Everything is all just code. Configuration is code.”
The impact: Nothing cuts through the fog of marketing like utilization stats. One of the things that I've heard about Kube is that people don't know what to do with it when they have it running. Use cases like this give them (and you) something to aspire to.
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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