{"id":38653,"date":"2022-07-08T16:02:20","date_gmt":"2022-07-08T16:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/?p=3982277"},"modified":"2022-07-08T16:02:20","modified_gmt":"2022-07-08T16:02:20","slug":"aws-is-quietly-getting-better-at-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/?p=38653","title":{"rendered":"AWS is quietly getting better at open source"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id>\n<p> AWS isn\u2019t the biggest corporate contributor to open source, but it\u2019s increasingly involved in the projects upon which its customers depend. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id>\n<figure id=\"attachment_3979216\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3979216\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-article wp-image-3979216\" src=\"http:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/aws-is-quietly-getting-better-at-open-source.jpg\" alt=\"Open source programming, digital products include permission to use the programming source code concept, programmer working lady using computer laptop working on unlock lock with coding symbol.\" width=\"770\" height=\"514\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3979216\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Image: Nuthawut\/Adobe Stock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<aside class=\"pinbox right\">\n<h3 class=\"heading\">Open source: Must-read coverage<\/h3>\n<\/aside>\n<p>AWS has quietly and steadily been improving with open source. Sure, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lastweekinaws.com\/blog\/awss-open-source-problem\/\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">Corey Quinn<\/a> might have been right when he said that, in the past, AWS \u201cconsistently and, in my opinion, incorrectly [tried] to shape a narrative where they\u2019re contributing to the open-source ecosystem at a level that\u2019s on par with its big tech company peers.\u201d But, that\u2019s what\u2019s happening now.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, AWS has discovered that one key to delivering on its first Leadership Principle (Customer Obsession) is to show up and contribute in meaningful ways to the open-source projects its customers care about. Apache Kafka is just the latest example of this.<\/p>\n<h2>A switch flipped<\/h2>\n<p>Divij Vaidya\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/divijvaidya\/status\/1544302433924521985\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">tweet<\/a> surprised me. Here\u2019s an AWS engineer that has become <a href=\"https:\/\/ossinsight.io\/analyze\/apache\/kafka\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">one of the most active contributors to Apache Kafka<\/a>. Granted, that\u2019s just over the last month. Looking at the <a href=\"https:\/\/projects.apache.org\/committee.html?kafka\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">Kafka PMC committee<\/a>, it\u2019s filled with individuals from Confluent and other companies that have contributed to Kafka for years, not months.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, it\u2019s telling that Vaidya, upon joining the Amazon Managed Service for Kafka (MSK) team a few months back, immediately started to contribute code to Kafka and is hiring a team that will be dedicated to contributing code to Kafka.<\/p>\n<p>This is exactly what critics have been saying AWS doesn\u2019t do. And, for years, they were mostly correct.<\/p>\n<p><strong>SEE: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/resource-library\/downloads\/40-open-source-and-linux-terms-you-need-to-know\/\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">40+ open source and Linux terms you need to know<\/a> (TechRepublic Premium)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>AWS was, and is, far more concerned with taking care of customers than being popular with open-source audiences. So, the company has <a href=\"https:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/opensource\/?blog-posts-content-open-source.sort-by=item.additionalFields.createdDate&amp;blog-posts-content-open-source.sort-order=desc\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">focused on<\/a> being \u201cthe best place for customers to build and run open-source software in the cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Historically, that tended to not involve or require contributing to the open-source projects it kept building managed services around. Many felt that was a mistake\u2014that a company so dependent on open source for its business was putting its supply chain at risk by not sustaining the projects upon which it depended. There were <a href=\"https:\/\/www.infoworld.com\/article\/3631376\/what-you-dont-know-about-working-with-aws.html\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">plenty of good reasons for all this<\/a>, but there were also more compelling reasons to change and do more.<\/p>\n<p>And so it has; though, generally not with trumpets and fanfare.<\/p>\n<p>PostgreSQL contributor (and sometime AWS open-source critic) Paul Ramsey has noticed. As he <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pwramsey\/status\/1545054558497280002\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">told me<\/a> recently, it \u201c[f]eels like a switch flipped at AWS a year or two ago. The strategic value of being a real stakeholder in the software they spin is now recognized as being worth the dollars spent to make it happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2>Taking care of customers<\/h2>\n<p>Years ago Tim Bray, then an engineering executive at AWS, argued that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tbray.org\/ongoing\/When\/201x\/2019\/09\/21\/AWS-Open-Source-People\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">operating open source software<\/a> was at least as important as building it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe qualities that make people great at carving high-value software out of nothingness aren\u2019t necessarily the ones that make them good at operations,\u201d Bray added.<\/p>\n<p>AWS might not be contributing much code, the implication ran, but making that code easy for customers to actually use was a big contribution in itself. All true.<\/p>\n<p><strong>SEE: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/article\/master-linux-docker-before-next-boom\/\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">Master Linux and Docker before the next Linux adoption boom<\/a> (TechRepublic Academy)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>But, what seems to be happening at AWS, if quietly and usually behind the scenes, is a shift toward AWS service teams taking greater ownership in the open-source projects they operationalize for customers. This allows them to more effectively deliver results because they can help shape the roadmap for customers, and it ensures AWS customers get the full open-source experience, rather than a forked repo with patches that pile up as technical debt.<\/p>\n<p>Vaidya and the MSK team is an example along with Madelyn Olson, an engineer with AWS\u2019s ElastiCache team and <a href=\"https:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/blogs\/opensource\/how-to-become-a-redis-maintainer-one-contribution-at-a-time\/\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">one of five core maintainers for Redis<\/a>. And then there are the AWS employees contributing to <a href=\"https:\/\/k8s.devstats.cncf.io\/d\/9\/companies-table?orgId=1&amp;var-period_name=Last%202%20years&amp;var-metric=contributions\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">Kubernetes<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/etcd.devstats.cncf.io\/d\/5\/companies-table?orgId=1&amp;var-period_name=Last%202%20years&amp;var-metric=contributions\" target=\"blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">etcd<\/a> and more.<\/p>\n<p>No, AWS is still not the primary contributor to most of these. Not yet. Google, Microsoft and Red Hat tend to top many of the charts, to Quinn\u2019s point above. This also isn\u2019t somehow morally wrong, as Quinn also argued: \u201cAmazon (and any company) is there to make money, not be your friend.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But slowly and surely, AWS product teams are discovering that a key element of obsessing over customers is taking care of the open-source projects upon which those customers depend. In other words, part of the \u201cundifferentiated heavy lifting\u201d that AWS takes on for customers needs to be stewardship for the open-source projects those same customers demand.<\/p>\n<p><em>Disclosure: I work for MongoDB, but the views expressed herein are mine.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AWS isn\u2019t the biggest corporate contributor to open source, but it\u2019s increasingly involved in the projects upon which its customers depend. Image: Nuthawut\/Adobe Stock Open source: Must-read coverage AWS has quietly and steadily been improving with open source. Sure, Corey Quinn might have been right when he said that, in the past, AWS \u201cconsistently and, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,134,40,783,177,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-amazon","category-aws","category-cloud","category-cloudsync","category-open-source","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}