Top Trends from the Linux Open Source Summit 2018
By Chris Terry, Platform Engineer
Last week, the open source community gathered for the enterprise event in Vancouver, British Columbia. Here’s some of our biggest takeaways from the 3 days we spent with Linux.
Container orchestration is here to stay
Containers have been a useful isolation tool for quite some time now. Since Docker’s first public release just five years ago, they’ve exploded in popularity and orchestration tools like OpenStack help relieve much of the management burden. At the OS Summit, Kubernetes led the pack, with talks ranging from avoiding first-timer mistakes (Setting up Kubernetes with Day 2 in Mind with Angela Chin & Urvashi Reddy, Pivotal) to Security Best Practices (Ian Lewis, Google) to reducing development and deployment friction (Enabling Developers with Open Source: Containers, Canaries, Cloud, and Continuous Delivery by Kenzan’s own cloud architect, Nicholas Parks).
The community is even starting to define interoperability standards, such as Google’s Container Storage Interface (Saad Ali, Google) to improve portability between the different toolsets.
Formalizing business-to-community interactions
The Linux Foundation partnered with the CHAOSS project (Community Health Analytics Open Source Software) for an all-day pre-summit workshop. Data analysis is a great way to prove the effects of our code changes at scale. The Open Source community is starting to define how we can work together to do the same for community engagement.
The CHAOSS project’s goals are to establish standard metrics for measuring open source communities, produce open source software to analyze those metrics, and build reporting tools to make them easily accessible to the community at large. It’s split up into two working groups: Growth-Maturity-Decline aims to define stages of life for open source projects and how the companies or communities running a project can manage that process. The Diversity and Inclusion group aims to understand “from a qualitative and quantitative point of view how diversity and inclusion can be measured.”
The workshop concluded with two key takeaways. First, don’t build your project health dashboards until you know what questions are being asked and who’s asking them. The industry is still working to define the metrics we need to answer these community-based questions. Without established best practices, it can be easy to answer the wrong questions by measuring the wrong metrics! This leads directly to the second: CHAOSS needs contributors! Anybody interested in taking part in the Open Source community can contribute. Early code and documentation is available at http://github.com/chaoss and the weekly working group calls are vibrant and welcoming.
Active diversity and inclusion efforts are proving to be both community and business wins
The topic of diversity in tech is not a new one but it was one of the biggest themes for this year’s Open Source Summit. With a focus on welcoming people from all walks of life into the community, diversity was supported at all levels of the conference — including gender neutral bathrooms.
The event featured a Diversity Summit track, covering a broad range of topics. We learned that active inclusion efforts lead to better project outcomes and higher profitability. A discussion opened during one talk about how different backgrounds make us better able to solve problems. (Diversity is Not Only About Ethnicity and Gender — Chloe Condon, Sentry.io) Throughout the track, there were multiple discussions about the inherent bias in technology. For example, fitness trackers that don’t include a pregnancy mode, or a public transit app that only gives a user a single entry for “work” because the designers didn’t have to worry about holding down multiple jobs. One session brought together engineers and managers to think through ways to avoid unintentional bias in Machine Learning datasets. Talks also showed us ways to create everyday opportunities for inclusion, and another offered ideas on how to make your job postings more welcoming of engineers with non-traditional (self-taught/boot camp) education.
Here are some resources that speakers provided for anyone interested in learning more about how to create a more inclusive and diverse industry, community and business.
http://gendermag.org/ — An academic project focusing on gender bias in software design. Early research shows problem solving styles tend to cluster around gender, and the documentation or design of a software product can impact how well different kinds of users can pick it up. This tool aims to make software more welcoming to different kinds of people.
http://projectinclude.org/ is a collection of ideas and recommendations about bringing an inclusive culture into a workplace.
https://www.gapjumpers.me/ — a “blind audition” service that hides many of the bias markers we accidentally judge prospects by, letting their skills speak for themselves.
https://textio.com/products/ — a machine-learning based tool for writing job postings that avoid the unintentional biases that may prevent the perfect candidate from even applying in the first place.
The cross-pollination from development into platform/operations
DevOps may be a buzzword, but more and more development tools and techniques are making their way into platform engineering minds, as well as projects. Daniel Pacrami with SAP Canada described his team’s efforts to add unit/integration/end-to-end testing into their Kubernetes-based platform, applying test-driven development to Infrastructure as Code. Code tracing is also being applied to platforms as a whole, expanding on the classic debugging definition (Understanding Microservices with Distributed Tracing — Lita Cho, Lyft). This kind of cross-pollination brings new features into the cloud platform space, reduces the friction for developers using self-service operations tools, and makes for easier cross-team collaboration in the long run.
Chris Terry is a musician-turned-platform engineer with a long-time focus on open source software. He moved from Linux sysadmin to hand-building CI/CD platforms and then into his current role doing cloud-native platform engineering at Kenzan
