Open Source All the Way Up the Stack

Software engineering and developer communities are driving the market for cloud consumption and leading each industry into a new era of software-defined disruption. There are no longer questions about elastic and flexible agile development as the way to innovate and reduce time to market for businesses. Open source software plays a key role in the transformation that’s taking place to cloud native and understanding how your business strategy needs to address this next disruption in software development is crucial to the success of your business. The role that developers have today is continuing to evolve and, as a developer, you will want to take an active role in understanding your part in this transformation as well as what specific open source communities in which to actively participate.

With open source as the de facto standard for software architecture and development, it’s more important than ever to remain current and deepen your knowledge around the strategies that are driving this transformation, specifically infrastructure, security, performance, collaboration and community, architecture, open hardware, and data analytics. The innovations happening in these areas are changing the way we think about business strategy and how competitive we can be in this continuously evolving business cycle.

However, physical and cloud infrastructure does not enable application development platforms natively nor provide the ability to create applications that are cloud native with elastic services. In addition, businesses are moving to application development architectures that leverage open source, which are becoming more strategic to their business strategy. When making the decision to build and operate an application on a physical or cloud platform, open source strategy becomes central to your application architecture and strategy.

It’s important today to determine how you plan to architect your applications for the business in an agile and flexible way – cloud native. The cloud native model consists of Secure DevOps, Mesos and Kubernetes orchestration, CI/CD, and a fully integrated data platform. It’s important to look for projects that have hardened the microservices infrastructure and created differentiation in the orchestration, service discovery, and networking areas. At Cisco, we have hardened and fully integrated an end-to-end solution with innovations in mantl.io architected with improved network performance in both the user and control planes.

In the user plane with open source, FD.io takes the approach that containers must be portable. With FD.io, you take your known-good net stack with you everywhere. We tackle the IP per container, which has become the norm, vs NAT (overlays, native IP etc.) to provide near wire speed routing. We incorporate high-performance APIs to address the state of the containers and address the possibility that a container change could potential result in a route change. For the network administrators, we have added a number of advanced container network functions ‘in stack’ (Multipath, VRF) and with multi-million entry FIBs you can rest assured scalability is addressed.

For the control plane, our innovations in application policy and Application Intent from open source Contiv and Shipped are enabling enterprises to extend their network control to multiple clouds while, at the same time, abstracting the complexity from developers.

Flexibility and extensibility are required capabilities for the cloud native model and the concepts of Consumption Interfaces have been architected to allow some choices and extensibility to be added into the consumption model for the developer of the cloud native application or service(s). This model allows us to support Kubernetes for the developer and Mesos frameworks for the data scientist. This is also how we integrate with Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

The business of open source is being Community Sourced – Organic and Open

Community is the key to any success. The value of open is critical not only from the contributions but also the individual’s ability to get involved for the greater interest in general.

GitHub has forever changed the landscape of development in a positive way.

Open source architecture platforms that support the agile needs of the application developer are starting to emerge and, for the most part, are organic in nature. Over the next several years, the ability of these platforms to embrace and extend open source to the communities of interest will be accelerated.

Strategic moves that you need to consider today are to learn more about the specific open source communities that are of interest to your career and/or business, get involved and contribute your knowledge, and code projects that either solve critical issues for your business or enable your business to gain a strategic advantage over your competition by leveraging the power of community.

This year, Open Container Day is part of OSCON. As a technical contributor to CNCF and OCI, I invite you to come to Open Container Day and hear from my peers on the state of container-based solutions, infrastructure, cloud native computing and networking, and much more.

Please join the community at OSCON 2016 where you can quickly go from consumer to contributor to your favorite open source projects and find out how open source can be a strategic advantage for your business. Visit Cisco at booth #209 and learn how Mantl and Shipped can accelerate your business.

We have the following sessions you’ll want to attend as well:

Ignite OSCON

Monday 5:00-6:30pm

Ballroom A

Don’t Fix it – Throw it Away! Intro to Disposable Infrastructure

Tuesday 1:30-5:00pm

Meeting Room 19

Open Source and Microservices: Your Badass, Next-gen Application Architecture

Wednesday 2:40-3:20pm

Meeting Room 17B