Airbyte is an open-source data integration engine that helps businesses consolidate data in data warehouses, lakes, and databases. When the company released Airbyte, they did so under the MIT open-source license. That was great for massive adoption, but the company wanted to make sure they were building a sustainable business such that all of the revenue they received could be re-injected into the community and building and making their product better.

Guest: Chip Childers

Company: Puppet

Show: Let’s Talk

Chip Childers, the co-founder of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, recently joined Puppet as Chief Architect. When he announced the move, Childers said that he is excited to go back to a role that’s about shipping products. "I fundamentally have that itch to make sure that I'm involved in getting products out the door,” said Childers.

With Linux turning 30, we've all had plenty of time to ruminate on how the operating system has evolved over the years. But what about how the platform has changed other systems and how it made other industries rise and prosper?

Guest: Chad Arimura

Company: Oracle

Show: Let’s Talk

Java 17 has finally been released and it promises an exciting array of new features and other enticing aspects. Let’s hear what Chad Arimura, the VP of Java Developer Relations at Oracle, has to say about this new iteration.

Guest: Shaun O'Meara

Company: Mirantis

Show: Let’s Talk

Mirantis makes it possible to ship code faster. They provide real choice at every level of the stack, so organizations can use their favorite tools and frameworks to make cloud-native development simpler. And with their latest announcement, Mirantis now offers a vendor-agnostic, centrally operated service that covers virtualization and containerization inside the data center. This new offering, called Mirantis Flow, a cloud-native data-center as a service offering, which is based on the current Mirantis Container Cloud products and is the culmination of many years of working with personalization products, community products, and swam products.

I sat down with Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research, to explore the factors that help Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) & Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) select their cloud providers.

Structure Research was founded 10 years ago in Toronto Canada as a research firm of analysts focused on the infrastructure services space. Their organization has seen, during the 18-month long pandemic, an acceleration of cloud infrastructure. Such an acceleration has led to faster deployment and the removal of barriers. To that end, Philbert Shih, Managing Director at Structure Research, says, "We follow the results coming from the public markets and not just the hyperscale guys, but also the SMB-oriented providers. Providers targeting SMBs are all showing tremendous growth and, in fact, are positioning for accelerated growth throughout '21 and into '22." This has led analysts, like Shih, to conclude that the cloud has become mainstream and will be a mainstay going forward.

FireHydrant is a purpose-built tool for reliability. With FireHydrant, businesses can better manage and learn from incidents, work with their legal and marketing teams, and all the way through customer service. This is a tool for the entire reliability lifecycle.

Guest: Cole Potrocky

Company: Kintaba

Show: Let's Talk

Cole Potrocky, CTO and co-founder of Kintaba, talks with Swapnil Bhartiya about incident management.

Kintaba is dedicated to modern incident management, enabling companies to better respond to major incidents and outages. The company got into this space because they considered it a learning problem.

According to Potrocky, "We figured failure is sort of a constant theme, whether you're a one-person company or whether you're a thousand-person company. You learn through getting to the periphery of what failure is, and then you reflect on that failure."

In this episode of Dirk & Swap: Conversations on Open Source, we talk about Open Core. What is it? How different is it from Open Source or Closed Source software? What are the pros and cons of Open Core? Is it better than proprietary software as at least something is open there? How to do Open Core in the right way (if there is one)... We tackle many such complicated questions in this show. I hope you will enjoy it. We have also published a transcript of the recording so you can read it if you want to!

Cassandra Database reaches 4.0.

Nearly six years on from the release of Apache Cassandra 3.0, the community behind the popular open-source distributed database has announced the release of v4.0 of Apache Cassandra. Patrick McFadin, VP of Developer Relations at DataStax, and Ben Bromhead, CTO of Instaclustr, are with Swapnil Bhartiya to talk about it.

The first issue to be addressed is the importance Cassandra holds in the modern world. McFadin starts off by talking about what workloads Cassandra is focused on, which are websites and mobile applications. McFadin says, "When you use a mobile app on your phone, you're probably using Cassandra."

Since its inception, Cassandra has developed into a "really awesome, general-purpose database," adds Bromhead. More importantly, he makes mention of scalability when he says, "As people reach the limits of scalability or availability when it comes to some of the other databases out there (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL), we see developers reaching for Apache Cassandra."

The discussion then shifts to the new features available in Cassandra v4.0. Bromhead talks about structural changes based around the Netty networking framework, which has enabled several really cool features, such as zero-copy streaming which allows an Apache Cassandra node to stream the data it's responsible for and leads to wire-level streaming speeds between nodes. Practically speaking, that means users can now run denser nodes. The 4.0 release also saw the deprecation of the Thrift protocol, in favor of the CQL protocol, which was a major change.

As far as the upgrade process is concerned, version 4.0 should be considerably easier than previous releases. "If you had been upgrading Cassandra, before, like in the three and twos, there was always a long list of intermediate patches that you had to put into place, or you had to do some extra work mid-upgrade. Because of that, the developers decided it was of utmost importance to make it simple," explains McFadin.

Bromhead calls out to developers and admins to "not stress too much about this one. Still run through all the track checks and the standard processes you do. But again, this has been pretty well battle-tested."

To further highlight the upgrade process, McFadin mentions that the maintainers had a lot of discussion about the project and how improvements to the upgrade start at the developer level. McFadin says, "Instead of just having someone drop code in and ask everyone what they think, we have a proposal process. So you outline the change that you want to make, we have good discussions about it, and make some changes before there's actual code." Processes like this certainly go a long way in making a project more stable over time.