TFIR: Open Source, Cloud Native & AI/ML

How the Change to CentOS Affects the Community

This past year, Red Hat made some changes to how CentOS is developed and released. With CentOS's strong following, the change came as a big surprise to the community, the user base, and enterprise companies. To that, Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Co-founder of RackN (https://tinyurl.com/458kbjpd), had this to say: "If CentOS was designed originally to be an alternative for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it was supposed to be an enterprise-grade Linux based on Red Hat bits." According to Hirschfeld, that led to a degree of commercial tension between the enterprise version (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and CentOS.

But how did this impact the end-users? Hirschfeld makes it clear the impact was and is significant. At RackN, Hirschfeld says, "We heard immediately from customers, asking questions about how they were going to sustain their versions of deployed operating systems." Hirschfeld offered up some specifics on what happens when the previous version of an operating system (in this case CentOS 8) isn't maintained. He says, "When somebody has a patch, or a change, or an upgrade, or they're writing software that relies on that version, which is very common, then they do not have a way to get patches or fixes for the operating system, they have to literally forward port anything they've built on that operating system to the latest version." Hirschfeld also adds that this type of forced migration is very bad, unattractive, not desirable, or not even commercially feasible.

As far as competitors are concerned, Hirschfeld mentions both Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, both of which are forks of CentOS and whose developers have committed to maintaining versions over time. He adds, "It's also worth noting that there are a lot of Linux distributions, like SUSE, Ubuntu, and Debian, which should be considered as an alternative." However, Hirschfeld says of their clients, "We do see people waiting to look at these alternatives. Some of them are just saying, I'm going to switch to a distro where I don't have to deal with vendors like Red Hat."

Hirschfeld ends the discussion with talks of migration and says, "I think the jury's still out on whether or not we end up with as dominant a distribution as we have seen with CentOS. And that ultimately, I think, will cause further fragmentation in the Linux industries."

Contributing to an open-source project isn't only about coding.

Dirk Hohndel, VP and Chief Open Source officer at VMware, and Swapnil Bhartiya, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of TFiR, discuss various ways in which people can contribute to open-source projects.

Hohndel starts off with an idea that has been at play with the open-source community for years, when he says, "What very often happens with open-source components is that as you use them, you suddenly start seeing things that you would like to be different." He goes on by saying, "There is this problem in this integration; there is a mistake in the translation of the user interface, there is this other component that I work with and there is a problem between them, or here's a bug that I found." He finishes that thought by mentioning the first time you submit a bug report to the developers, you are contributing to open source. Hohndel states, "Any interaction with the developer team is a contribution."

To that point, Swapnil adds, "It is natural that if you're using an open-source tool, you will engage with code at some point."

But not everyone who uses open source has either the skill or the time to write code, so it's not an unavoidable path. And for those who do wish to contribute to an open-source project, it can be done via enhancement requests, submitting bug reports, helping to improve documentation, adding or fixing a translation, and helping with localizations.

One very interesting idea is that of snowflakes. Hohndel adds, "When you fix something locally, you have created a snowflake. You have created something that is unique. That is not what everyone else uses, but that is your version. And this is where the desire that I talk so much about, of contributing back to the project in a patch, in the form of code."

Fortunately, as Bhartiya says, "When you are using open source, the code is open to you. So you will be able to see problems and may want to fix them. And scratching your own itch can become a contribution as well." That idea is very much at the heart of where most open-source contributions start.

But what are the other ways in which companies can contribute to open source? Hohndel lists out some very good ideas such as, giving open-source projects money, helping to write code, translating documentation, helping project engineers to understand various use-cases and how the project is used in real life, creating a design process and providing input into the user interface, helping to make sure the software is usable to people with disabilities. To that list, Bhartiya adds the very important aspect of helping with marketing, which is a big part of what helps keep open-source projects healthy and viable.

How can you start contributing to an open-source project? To that end, Hohndel says the project's code repository (such as GitHub) is a great place to start. On services like GitHub, users can open an issue for a project, which is a fantastic way to start the conversation. Ultimately, Hohndel says, "When I engage with a new project, the first thing I do is look at their mailing list and read the last couple of weeks of posts. Or, if there is an IRC or Slack channel, I see how people are interacting." With that information in hand, you'll find it much easier to start contributing to an open-source project.

Observability is key to your cloud strategy

According to anynines, observability is defined as The value for how well the internal state of a system can be derived from external sources. Although monitoring can warn you of failure, observability can help you discover why something failed.

Patrick Hartz, Sales Engineer at anynines, starts off by remembering what application performance monitoring (APM) was 20 years ago (when he first started in professional software development): "APM was used to watch static models [and] to see how an application behaves." Today's development process is quite different. To that, Hartz says, "By adopting modern application development practices and splitting legacy applications into microservices, the way we observe the systems has changed. So apps are mostly deployed into a lot of containers. And therefore you have more complex scenarios, which demand specialized knowledge."

As Hartz puts it, one of the biggest challenges application developers often face is, "that they don’t have access to the internals of Cloud Foundry, they only own their application container. So Cloud Foundry is designed to let the application developers run their application and data service themselves."

Hartz goes on to discuss the different perspectives and different needs for observability. He says, "If you are a platform operator and you provide data services or the whole platform as a service to your customers, then you can have different kinds of SLAs." On the contrary, "As an operator, I will also observe your data service, for example, to guarantee that the opposite service always behaves in the best way." Finally, he adds, "You can immediately see that observability comes with the responsibility on how to operate and how to deal with your application and data service."

But what about the awareness of observability? To that, Hartz offers up a telling anecdote. "...In one of the meetings I had with end-users, I was asked to get system metrics of an application container. I was a bit surprised that I couldn't find an out-of-the-box solution."

Finally, Hartz hits on the importance of observability when he says, "Observability...works hand in hand with high availability. You need to be alerted to the fact that things are not healthy before it hits the customer. And you need the proper information and tools to investigate and react based on information, not feelings or guesses."

"How Self Service is All About Empowering Developers"

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider which empowers developers with cloud services to help them deploy and scale their applications. Raman Sharma, VP of Product Marketing at DigitalOcean, talks about how their self-service model is all about optimizing the path of a developer. Sharma starts off by pointing out there are multiple paths to take for application building: The full DIY Infrastructure as a Service model, the Platform as a Service model, and the Cloud Native method. To this end, Sharma says, "...We believe in providing them [developers] an experience where they can serve themselves; they should not need help from an expert or a service provider, just to be able to get started with that platform. So that's kind of what we are focused on."

Talking further about this self-service model, Sharma says, "The self-service model is about removing all friction, from the path of a developer towards successfully consuming your products, and going about their business." Sharma also indicates that DigitalOcean is not in the low-code/no-code space, but a platform for technical practitioners (people with slightly deeper technical skills) and that, "...From the point that you sign up on the website, to onboarding and getting started with your first project, and then the next step to adding more team members to your projects, we want to make sure that all of this is super seamless."

To that end, DigitalOcean is "feverishly focused" on ensuring this experience for developers (and small development teams) is super optimal and that they have all of the tools and knowledge available to get started. With everything in place, those who develop on the DigitalOcean platform can use the services themselves and won't have to rely on someone else to get everything set up and configured.

At the same time, DigitalOcean is seeing that, increasingly, developers care more about productivity and less about the underlying infrastructure. For that, Sharma says, "...We have created services like App Platform, which we released last year, which is a fully managed, Platform-as-a-Service offering, which actually runs on top of our compute and our Kubernetes infrastructure." Sharma follows up with, "But it provides an experience to developers, which is very seamless; they don't have to worry about managing or orchestrating the underlying infrastructure."

Finally, Sharma says that DigitalOcean thinks of their cloud as an "...open canvas which is available for developers to come and express their creativity by building applications."

As companies rush to embark on their cloud-native journey, it is becoming increasingly important to have visibility into their stack. In this interview, Richard Hartmann, Director of Community at Grafana Labs, talks about the importance of observability and why companies have it as a core requirement. In addition to understanding observability, we also talked about open-source technologies like Prometheus and how Grafana Labs is making it easier for customers to leverage these open source technologies.

Automation is one of the driving forces behind digital transformation and cloud-native adoption. There are many flavors of automation and RPA or Robotic Process Automation is one of those flavors. Robocorp is a fast-growing start-up based out of Helsinki and San Francisco that’s building RPA solutions on top of open-source technologies to help RPA developers with tools and platforms they need to get their job done.

In this episode of Let’s Talk, I sat down with the CEO and Co-Founder of Robocorp, Antti Karjalainen, to learn more about the company that just closed $21 million in series A funding. The discussion centered on RPA, open source and how Robocorp is offering support for cloud-native applications. We also talked about the areas where Robocorp would be investing in considering the Series A funding.

Guest: Antti Karjalainen

Company: Robocorp

About the guest: Antti Karjalainen is CEO & Co-founder of Robocorp and member of the board at Robot Framework Foundation. An open-source enthusiast with a background in software engineering, he's on a mission to transform the RPA industry with open-source technology and delivery for software robots.

About the company: Robocorp empowers businesses and teams to work smarter by shattering previous boundaries of RPA and intelligent automation. It makes it easy, affordable and fast for developers to build software robots and automate manual tasks with first-class, open-source process automation tools. It also provides a robust, secure orchestration and execution platform to allow customers to run both cloud-based and self-managed robotic automations.

We all love to talk about our ‘multi-cloud’ stories and strategies, but the fact is most organizations go ‘multi-cloud’ by accident. Different teams within an organization pick their own cloud and they end up with ‘accidental’ multi-cloud, which leads to more complexities and problems. In this episode of Let’s Talk, Tim Wagner, CEO of Vendia, talks about such accidental multi-cloud deployments, what challenges they pose and what are the correct steps to embrace a truly multi-cloud strategy. He also talks about the concept of “Polycloud”, which he believes is the right way to approach ‘many’ clouds.

This discussion covers a wide range of topics including how companies fall into the trap of accidental multi-cloud, what role cross-cloud solutions like containers and Kubernetes play in accidental multi-cloud, and what are the side-effects of accidental multi-cloud beyond cost. Next, we take a deep dive into the Polycloud and how different it is from multi-cloud. Will we ever achieve cloud nirvana where users can run their workloads in ‘any’ cloud without having to worry about data gravity and getting locked into one vendor? We also talk about Vendia’s solution to address this problem and also ask Tim to share some tips on how to have a coherent and concrete multi-cloud strategy.

Show: Let’s Talk

Guest: Tim Wagner (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Company: Vendia

Topics: Cloud Computing

About the guest: Tim Wagner is CEO of Vendia, and formerly kick-started the serverless movement with the development of AWS Lambda.

About the company: Vendia is a serverless, distributed data platform for sharing data and code in real time across clouds, teams, and partners. Vendia is designed to be simple to use and easy to deploy by bringing together the ease-of-use and unlimited scalability of serverless, with the decentralization benefits of distributed ledgers so that enterprise IT can access and manage data easily, securely, and at scale, no matter where it resides.

Learn more: https://www.leostream.com

In this episode of Let’s Talk, we sat down with Karen Gondoly, CEO at Leostream, a company that leverages open-source technologies to offer vendor-neutral VDI solutions to organizations of all sizes. The pandemic has created a massive demand for remote access to application environments so users can continue to work accessing enterprise applications remotely. In this interview, we talked about how the pandemic has changed the world around and also explored how Leostream helps organizations better manage their resources and also allow them to work with talented people all across the globe without any need for relocation.

Guest: Karen Gondoly (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Company:

Show: Let’s Talk

Topics: Virtualization, Remote Work, Open Source, Linux

About the company: Leostream provides the critical connection-broker technology required for enterprises to achieve successful large-scale VDI, hosted desktop, or hosted application environments in both private and public clouds.

About the guest: Karen Gondoly joined Leostream from The MathWorks, Inc., a technical software company where she was a developer for the Control System Toolbox before specializing in usability. Her technical background includes roles as a software developer, GUI designer, technical writer, and usability specialist. Karen holds bachelor's and master of science degrees in aeronautical/astronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk (which was recorded a while back), Sylvia Hooks, Vice President (Portfolio Marketing & Enablement) - Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, talks about one of the recent surveys by Aruba to better understand how IT leaders recognize that the ability of organizations to realize business value from data increasingly depends on their capacity to collect, process, store, and analyze that data at the edge.

We covered a wide range of topics in this interview including how Hooks would define the ‘edge’. How are modern enterprises already leveraging edge computing? What trends is Hooks seeing in the space in terms of edge adoption? Unique challenges that edge poses and what kind of solutions is Aruba building to tackle those challenges? We then talked about the data side of the edge and how companies are processing data at the edge itself, instead of sending it back to the cloud. We also touched upon one of the biggest focus areas of TFiR -Security. We concluded the interview with a discussion on how the edge is using AI and ML technologies.

Guest: Sylvia Hooks (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Featured Company: Aruba

Show: Let’s Talk

Topics: Edge Computing

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, we invited Navya Dwarakanath, Solutions Engineer at Catchpoint, to talk about the importance of observability and SLOs as more and more companies are rushing towards digital transformation and embracing cloud-native technologies. We started off our discussion with learning a bit more about Catchpoint, a digital experience monitoring platform which is helping companies with end-user monitoring, using both active & proactive as well as reactive monitoring methodologies.

We then talked about the factors that are contributing to the increase in the growing popularity of observability. We also talked about the ‘holistic’ approach to observability so that users can take actions based on the metrics observability tools provide them with.

We also took a deep dive into the cultural or people and social side of observability which is as important as the tech aspect. We then moved to the core of the topic - SLO - as this interview was recorded as part of our coverage of SLOConf. What’s the difference between SLO and SLA and why organizations should care about SLOs? We also asked her for recommendations or suggestions that organizations should follow as they implement SLOs. She also warned against some of the mistakes that organizations make with SLOs.

Guest: Navya Dwarakanath (Twitter, LinkedIn)

Featured company: Catchpoint

Show: Let’s Talk

Topics: Observability, Cloud Native, Kubernetes