Exploring Open-Source and Cloud-Native with Tracy Miranda

The conversation covers:

• Tracy’s thoughts on how the relationship between open-source and cloud-native should be described.
• The advantages and disadvantages to an organization using open-source.
• Some of the major risks associated with using open-source, and why companies should approach with caution.
• Why CI/CD is a rising security concern for open-source organizations.Tracy also provides her thoughts on how businesses are handling the CI/CD pipeline today, and where the trend is heading.
• Some of the unresolved challenges related to continuous delivery that currently exist.
• Tracy’s advice for companies that are just starting to develop an open-source contribution strategy.
• How companies should approach topics like open-source strategizing and building open-source communities.
• The common mistakes that individuals and companies make when nurturing open-source communities. Tracy also comments on mistakes that people are making with continuous delivery.

Links

• CloudBees: https://www.cloudbees.com/
• Continuous Delivery Foundation: https://cd.foundation/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tracymiranda

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. Today, I'm chatting with Tracy Miranda. Tracy, thank you so much for joining me.

Tracy: Hi, Emily. Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure.

Emily: So, as usual, I just want to start off with having you introduce yourself, both what you do, where you work, but also, like, some details, what does this actually mean? How do you actually spend your day?

Tracy: Yeah, so I'm the director of open-source CloudBees, and I'm also the board chair at the Continuous Delivery Foundation, which is an open-source foundation, which is home to projects like Jenkins, and Spinnaker, and Tecton, and Jenkins X. So, basically, I'm a big fan of all things open-source, which in day-to-day means I'm doing anything which is related to building communities. So, either involved with code, or building communities and through conferences, or sometimes just the boring governance stuff around open-source.

Emily: What is the boring governance stuff around open-source?

Tracy: So, I guess it is just trying to get folks moving in the same direction, and reminding people that it's sometimes more than just code. And whether it's updating a code of conduct, and one of the things we've seen and—okay, I wouldn't call this boring; it's actually taken over a bit in open-source communities, but it's sort of different from the code, but it's the whole terminology updates. We've seen a lot of open-source communities have become more aware about wanting to be better about using terms like ‘master’ and ‘slave’ and move away from that. That being said, it's not that easy, so there's a lot to do in getting people on the same page and ready to move forward even before you can start changing a line of code.

Emily: Since the topic of the podcast is cloud-native, obviously, open-source and cloud-native are related. In fact, some people think that cloud-native must be open-source. Where do you fall on that spectrum? How do you think the relationship between open-source and cloud-native should be described?

Tracy: Yeah, I think that they're pretty distinct things. So, cloud-native is all about using the Cloud effectively and having technology which takes advantage of modern architectures to give you things like rapid elasticity, or on-demand self-service. And that's distinct from open-source, which is around the licensing, and it's become more about communities, as well. But I think because Kubernetes has been the most successful cloud-native project that is open-source, I guess there's become this very, very strong association which, in my mind, is a very, very good thing because I think open-source communities are really the way to drive innovation very, very quickly across the industry.

Emily: And this may seem sort of obvious, but what are some of the advantages and disadvantages to an organization in using open-source?

Tracy: Yes. So, I think—well, lots—virtually every company uses open-source, and the first thing people can see as the benefits are just the engineering efficiencies. So, using technologies which, say aren’t core to the business, but then building on top of those and taking advantage of the features rather than dedicating their own engineering resources to developing them. I used to work as a consultant, and I would go from company to company, and usually, they would be adopting open-source when they wanted to get away from an in-house project where the people or person who had written it had left the company. So, I think there's a lot to be said, as well, for sustainability of technology: that communities and open-source communities are really good at sustaining projects over the long term, and therefore kind of the best bet for technology that's going to live on beyond individuals or even companies, acquisitions, or whatever.

Emily: Do you think there are any risks to using open-source? I'm even interested in hearing if there are risks that are not real, but that are perceived risks. And then even maybe some risks that people don't think about, but that are in fact, quite real.

Tracy: Yes, yeah, no, absolutely there are risks. So, it's wise for companies to approach with caution. I think the risks sort of depend on which side—like, are you looking to just use open-source that someone else has written, or are you contributing something, which might be key to your company, but then you’re saying, “Okay, I'm going to do this in an open way,” which brings us to one of those common perceived myths, that someone, like a cloud provider, is then going to take your open-source software and do a better job of making money around it, so thereby just ruining your entire business model.

And I think the other area where we tend to see a lot of dialogue around, is always around open-source security. For a long time, people used to, sort of, make out that this was different from closed source security, somehow. Security through obscurity meant that closed-source was better than open-source, which is clearly not the case. You can have secure open-source software, not secure open-source software. It just really depends on the project and the practices.

Emily: And then also, I thought we'd talk a little bit specifically about this CI/CD work that you do. How important is CI/CD, do you think, in the pursuit of being cloud-native?

Tracy: Yes, no, I think CI/CD h...