Since the birth of open source, has attracted numerous preacher and practitioner of the concept of open-source advocate for the struggle, AWS Adrian Cockcroft is one of a vice president of global cloud infrastructure strategy. Long before adding AWS, Adrian would single-handedly established and led Netflix (Netflix) is an open source program. In 2014, he joined the venture capital firm Battery Ventures, dedicated to the promotion of DevOps, micro-services, innovative applications and cloud container. 2016 Cockcroft joined AWS, and established an experienced team of open source development, open source sharing valuable experience in terms of AWS Developer Forum keynote speech from around the world as well as major conference.
Open source is the driving force for technological progress
Adrian has been that sharing technology can quickly promote the development of technology, therefore, during Netflix work, Adrian specifically advocated the internal network to fly open source projects, namely the future famous NetflixOSS, and shared intranets fly with the world some very good ideas. It is also because by means of this open source project, Netflix this idea was ultimately more of an impact in the world, while Netflix finally become now has the nation's third of Internet traffic and 36 million subscribers from 40 countries of the "monster . " Adrian said, in fact, the best product on the market by a large number of terminals are groups consisting of developers to promote development, it is true whether it is in the database, machine learning or other technical fields. The benefits of having many developers groups in the community, is the collaborative work of a stronger, better performance of the work. Especially when such technology concepts massive spread, then it's technology commercialization process will be much smoother. For example, the original database is a proprietary technology, but later began from MySQL and PostgreSQL, an open source database wind swept field. Since then, the database itself is more competitive from an interface that is open, rather than a competitive database itself.
The same is true in the cloud, AWS is no exception, AWS has a lot of services are based on open source development. In fact, AWS in long lasting bonds with the open source, AWS is also very active in contributing to the open source community, for example, can be extended in depth learning framework MXNet aspects, AWS has 400 developers contributed 40% of the code. In fact, AWS many users are using various open source systems, they also hope that AWS can help them operate and maintain these open source systems. Precisely because of this kind of customer feedback, AWS developed a lot of open source-related services, and business accounting for these services is growing. Therefore, for purposes of AWS, open source is a big trend in the future, AWS will develop more open source projects, will provide users with more open source services. Especially in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, two, basically entirely based on open source, therefore, AWS will continue to expand investment in these open source projects.
Open source is to provide users with more choices
However, while AWS contribute in terms of revenue, investment in the open source aspects of a lot, but many people believe, AWS contribution to open source and its largest cloud vendor status does not match, for example, Iguaz.io founder yaron haviv said, AWS so-called open source is for show, like Google did. However, Adrian as one of the most important promoters of open source AWS in but dismissed the idea.
"We can not see there is any conflict between open source and less than AWS business with commercial interests. In fact what the customer needs to provide customers with what we have to solve a problem is actually a variety of methods. For instance, some customers said the need to open source solutions Kubernetes, then, AWS provides Kubernetes no problem. but from the user's point of view, our Amazon ECS easier to manage. both methods are feasible, the key is to look at the needs of customers. "
Adrian stressed, AWS provides an open source services, in fact, come from the needs of users, for example, a user uses the open-source system, but found it too difficult operation and maintenance, so please AWS to help them go to operation and maintenance. Or open source system for customers too critical, they feel let AWS do more at ease. Thus, for AWS, it is an open source project to do from customer requirements, which is a value-added services to provide users. Many open source projects are a shortage of supply of services market, so do open source projects AWS basically meet the future needs of users, AWS does not fancy himself a an open source project.
Adrian also cited the example of a Amazon Corretto to substantiate this view. Corretto reason to be developed, because with more internal AWS use JAVA, JAVA and support model has been changed, many users do not like this change. So, AWS to do a Corretto, it is actually open to the JDK JAVA development kit by Corretto, the user during JAVA development when you do not need to take into account changes in JAVA support mode.
Open source software development has become the norm
Adrian believes that open source has now become mainstream, small businesses in the ordinary sense in using open source in the United States the most stringent financial regulation, the government sector, have been already using open source. In addition, open source has become the norm in software development, if you want to develop a software and can get quite good results, open source is basically an inevitable choice. At the same time, we also see something like GitHub, RedHat such open source enterprise acquired by other companies, which shows a side from open source is indeed has its value.
In addition, there are some like Elastic, MongoDB listed on this open source-based companies, especially MangoDB, its business grew very fast, although AWS also provides and MongoDB competing services, but did not able to hinder MongoDB own business strong the growth momentum. Therefore, Adrian think there will be more investment into the open field, and there will be more and more open source companies achieve better development.
Adrian concludes, "Open source is not really a business model, it is more of a market-oriented strategies or methods, especially when a company wants to do open source engineering resources to maximize their time, it can use the cloud to do market promotion. in fact, now open source has become a very good marketing tool, especially if you choose the AWS cloud such leading vendors, will be able to amplify both maximize engineering resources and marketing. open source company the software can run on the AWS cloud, but AWS is provided by specialized service to ensure long-term stability of open source services or programs to run. like Amazon DocumentDB AWS, it is certified to support the MongoDB, this is actually also in terms of MongoDB a very powerful marketing. "
