Watch Stormy Peters describe how the interactions between companies and open source software communities influence our culture, in this keynote from LinuxCon Europe 2016.
Shaping the Culture of Open Source Companies
With all of the discussion about source code contributions in open source, sometimes we don’t spend enough time talking about the culture. In her keynote at LinuxCon Europe, Stormy Peters points out that when we say the word “culture,” we sometimes think only about diversity or hiring more women, but culture means more than that. Culture is about how we work, how we think, and how we interact with each other.
It used to be that companies were confused by open source software, and the communities were often skeptical about companies. These days, most of the Internet, most of the web, and most of the world runs on open source software with open source communities and companies working together, Peters points out. She compares the early days of open source to street art. Many people don’t understand why an artist would create a work of art for free, which is something we heard quite often in the early days of open source. Derivative work and building on the work of others is also common in street art along with social norms that a street artist should only make the work better and never deface the work of better artists. This is similar to how we have norms and unspoken ways of working in open source software.
One of the main open source contributions from companies comes in the form of providing careers in open source software. Peters once worried about whether people who are paid by companies to work on open source software would stop doing it when the company stopped paying them. Instead, she found that they might stop working on a project if it doesn’t seem as important anymore, but they’ll probably stay in open source software.
Peters talked about how companies have helped open source software grow and helped many more people get involved, which has also brought us more diversity. While the technology industry as a whole is not very diverse, companies tend to have a more diverse population than open source software, and when they pay people to work, they bring that entire cohort with them. Anecdotally, she knows quite a few women that have started their careers with a paid job and become involved in open source software that way, which mirrors her experience starting in open source as part of her job at HP. These companies influence open source software, but it is a two-way cultural exchange, and we also influence these companies.
The way that we interact with the companies and the individuals around us shapes our culture, and every time we make a decision about whether to interact over the phone, on a mailing list, or have conversations over drinks, we are shaping the culture and the society that we’re creating. “We are the backbone of society right now, so I think it’s really important that we create a culture that is open, as open as our projects,” Peters says.
Watch the complete video below for more about how the interactions between companies and open source software communities influences our culture.
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SK Telecom CTO Discusses The Future of Software-Defined Networking in the Telco Industry
As more people access the Internet from their mobile devices, mobile operators must adapt their networks to accommodate skyrocketing data use and new traffic patterns. To do so, they’re turning to the same principles of software-defined networking (SDN) already finding success in the data center.
Next-generation 5G networks will be built with SDN technologies, revolutionizing telco infrastructure, says Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO, Executive Vice President and Head of the Corporate R&D Center at SK Telecom. Open source projects such as ONOS and CORD are leading the revolution and provide a good starting point for telco companies in SDN, he said.
Dr. Choi will give a keynote on “The Road to 5G with Open Source” at Open Networking Summit 2017, to be held April 3-6 in Santa Clara. Here, he discusses how SK Telecom is involved in open source networking, some of the successes the industry has had, and the challenges it faces in 2017.
Linux.com: How is SK Telecom using SDN today?
Dr. Alex Choi: We are using SDN to control data center network and transport network. In our data center, SDN is used to construct and control leaf-spine fabric networking using a commercial SDN solution. Additionally, we are planning to use SDN to manage the virtual network of our cloud. At this time, we are considering an open source controller and our own open source solution.
We have built T-SDN using SDN technology to control transport network, T-SDN controls Layer 0 and Layer 1 of our transport network. We will try to expand T-SDN for bandwidth and VPN control of the transport network.
Linux.com: Which open source networking projects does your organization use and contribute to? Why do you participate? How are you contributing?
Choi: We are working with ONOS and CORD projects. We have joined ONOS in 2015 and are contributing our virtual network solution for data center and OpenStack, called SONA (Simplified Overlay Networking Architecture). Additionally, we have been contributing to the Open-CORD project. We have proposed the M-CORD project and have been leading it with ON.Lab, and also have contributed VTN (virtual tunnel networking) module for CORD Infrastructure.
We believe that cooperation with global community is very important for improving code quality, and the open source project is the best way for global cooperation.
Linux.com: What have been the biggest successes in SDN in the past year, and what do you expect the industry to accomplish in 2017?
Choi: The showcase of the M-CORD project with the 5G use cases is the biggest milestone in the SDN world. In the early stage of SDN, the concept of SDN was used for traffic engineering in large-scale L3 networks by Google. However, since then SDN has been applied mainly in the data center networking but not in the telco infrastructure.
Recently (two years ago), as the TCO reduction is inevitable in the telco industry, the CORD project has been born to transform telco’s central offices to data center, and M-CORD project has additionally been launched to transform mobile network functions such as IMS and EPC. We expect that M-CORD project would be the real reference architecture for 5G infrastructure.
Linux.com: What will be the biggest challenges for SDN in 2017?
Choi: Six years have passed since SDN was born. During these years, SDN technology has evolved dramatically: many new protocols and stacks have been developed such as FBOSS, SAI, and P4, in addition to OpenFlow, and many commercial solutions have been out in the market, and tons of SDN related open source projects have been launched.
Now it is high time to transform our telco infrastructure using the solutions. The market might not wait anymore. Even though some SDN solutions from major vendors were so successful, it was done in very limited areas such as data center networking, and the impact was not so significant. It would be the biggest challenge to show how SDN can revolutionize the telco infrastructure this year with real use cases.
Linux.com: What’s your advice to individuals and companies getting started in SDN?
Choi: The basic concept of SDN is separating the control plane and data plane of network devices, but we should not understand that SDN is just using OpenFlow protocol or applying white-box switches. These days there are tons of ways of adopting SDN technologies, including commercial solutions from traditional legacy device vendors and open source solutions from many startups.
We strongly recommend studying reference applications such as ONOS use cases and reference architecture like CORD as the starting point. They have the right use cases and light architecture, and thus it is easy to understand the SDN technologies. Also, they have large communities and it is easy to get help on any troubleshooting.
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Stageless Deployment Pipelines: How Containers Change the Way We Build and Test Software
Large web services have long realized the benefits of microservices for scaling both applications and development. Most dev teams are now building microservices on containers but they haven’t updated their deployment pipeline for the new paradigm. They still use a classic build -> stage -> test -> deploy model. It’s classic and entrenched and it’s just a bad way to release code.
First the bad, staging servers get in the way of continuous delivery
Most development teams will recognize this everyday reality. You work in a sprint to get a number of changes completed. You open a new branch for each feature you work on and then you send it on for a pull request to a master, staging, or developer branch. The staging branch (or worse, your master branch) is then deployed to a staging server with all the changes from developers in the last few days (or two weeks). Then it’s pushed to staging.
But oh no, there is a problem. The application doesn’t work, integration tests fail, there’s a bug, it’s not stable, or maybe you just sent the staging url to the marketing team and they don’t like the way a design was implemented. Now you need to get someone to go into the staging/master branch that’s been poisoned with this change. They probably have to rebase, then remerge a bunch of the pull requests minus the offending code and then push it back into staging. Assuming all goes well the entire team has only lost a day.
In your next retrospective the team talks about better controls and testing before things reach staging but no one stops to ask the question why they’re using this weird staging methodology anyway when we live in a world with containers and microservices. Staging servers were originally built for monolithic apps and were only meant to provide simple smoke tests to see that code didn’t just run on a developer’s local machine, but would at least run in some other server somewhere. Even though they are used for full application testing with microservices it’s not an efficient way to test changes.
Here’s the end result
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Batched changes happen in a slow cadence
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One person’s code only releases when everyone’s code is ready
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If a bug is found, the branch is now poisoned and you have to pull apart the merges to fix it (often requiring a crazy git cheatsheet to figure it out).
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Business owners don’t get to see code until it’s really too late to make changes
How should it work? Look at your production infrastructure
Your production infrastructure is probably ephemeral; built up of on demand instances in Amazon/Azure/Google Cloud. Every developer should be able to spin up an instance on demand for their changes, send it to QA, iterate, etc before sending it on to release.
Instead of thinking about staging servers we have test environments which follow along the classic git branch workflow. Each test environment can bring together all the interconnected microservices for much richer testing conditions.
Following this model changes the whole feedback and iteration loop to stay within the feature branch, never moving onto merge and production until all stakeholders are happy. Further, you can actually test each image against the different versions of microservices.
To accomplish this DevOps teams can build lots of scripts, logic and workflows that they have to maintain or there’s tools out there that already build the stuff into a hosted CI as part of the container lifecycle management.
The advantages of test on demand iteration model
Once your test structure becomes untethered from a stagnant staging model dev teams can actually produce code faster. Instead of waiting for DevOps or approval to get the changes onto a staging server where stakeholders can approve the code goes straight into an environment where they can share and get feedback.
It also allows a much deeper level of testing that traditional CI by bringing all the connected microservices into a composition. You can actually write unit tests that rely on interconnected services. In this paradigm, integration testing allows for a greater variety of tests and each testing service essentially becomes it’s own microservice.
Once iteration is complete the code should be ready to go straight into Master (after a rebase) eliminating the group exercise that normally takes place around staging. Testing and iteration happens at the feature level, and then can be deployed at the feature level.
That means no more staging.
About Dan Garfield and Eran Barlev
Dan Garfield is a full-stack web developer with Codefresh, a container lifecycle management platform that provides developer teams of any size advanced pipelines and testing built specifically for containers like Docker. Check them out at https://codefresh.io
Eran is an ISTQB Certified Tester with over 20 years of experience as a software engineer working primarily in compiled languages. He is the Founder of the Canadian Software Testing Board (www.cstb.ca) and an active member of the ISTQB (www.istqb.org – International Software Testing Qualifications Board).
The Companies That Support Linux and Open Source: VMware
VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility and has been active in open source development for many years.
The company has steadily increased its open source involvement through Linux Foundation projects such as ONAP, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Cloud Foundry, Open vSwitch and others. And it has just increased its commitment to open source and The Linux Foundation by becoming a Gold member.
Open source software helps VMware accelerate its development processes and deliver even better solutions to its customers, said Dirk Hohndel, Chief Open Source Officer at VMware, in the Q&A below.
“We see open source components as vital ingredients to our products and are actively engaged in many upstream projects,” Hohndel said. “We also continue to create new and interesting open source projects of our own.”
Hohndel leads VMware’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open source communities. Before joining VMware, he spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist and he’s been an active developer and contributor in Linux and open source since the early 1990s.
Here, Hohndel tells us more about VMware; how Linux and open source have become integral to their business; and how they participate in the open source community.
Linux.com: What does VMware do?
Dirk Hohndel: VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology. We help our customers to build and evolve scalable production IT environments delivered as an on-prem or hybrid cloud solution that meets their needs. Additionally, we provide customers with modern end-user computing solutions that enable users to access their critical applications, desktops and services using any device or platform.
Linux.com: How and why do you use Linux and open source?
Hohndel: VMware uses many open source components as part of the solutions we deliver to our customers. Linux is a key guest (and host) OS that we support and the basis of many customer solutions that run on top of our infrastructure.
We see open source components as vital ingredients to our products and are actively engaged in many upstream projects. We also continue to create new and interesting open source projects of our own such as the Project Clarity design system or the Project Harbor container image registry.
Linux.com: Why did you increase your commitment to The Linux Foundation?
Hohndel: We see The Linux Foundation as one of the key consortia in the broader open source ecosystem. In parallel, we steadily increased our engagements with the various projects and foundations such as ONAP, CNCF, Cloud Foundry, and others under the LF in the past few years. It only made sense to increase our engagement in and support for The Linux Foundation, given the role its projects play in our business.
Linux.com: What interesting or innovative trends in technology are you witnessing and what role do Linux and open source play in them? How is VMware participating in that innovation?
Hohndel: The IT infrastructure industry is constantly evolving. More and more of the relevant solutions stacks are built around open source components, and many companies are collaborating on accelerating the transformation of entire industry verticals. The recently launched ONAP Project is an excellent example of this trend and VMware was one of the founding Platinum sponsors of this project.
Linux.com: How has participating in the Linux and open source communities changed your company?
Hohndel: At its roots, VMware is an engineering driven company. Our engagement with the Linux and open source communities has helped us accelerate our development processes and allowed us to collaborate with other partners and customers in this space to deliver even better solutions.
Linux.com: Is there anything else important or upcoming that you’d like to share?
Hohndel: For VMware, the upgrade to a Gold sponsorship of the Linux Foundation is an integral part of our open source strategy and a key step on our journey to a more open and collaborative future. We look forward to working across many LF projects in order to create solutions that delight our customers.
Learn more about Linux Foundation corporate membership and see a full list of members at https://www.linuxfoundation.org/members/join.