OStatic's Interviews with Open Source Trailblazers
As 2017 approaches, it's clear that cloud computing and Big Data analytics are huge tech themes, and open source technologies are helping to drive these trends. However, a whole lot of enabling technologies and corollary trends are arriving as well.
Recently, we've done some interviews with leaders on the open source scene who can speak to these corollary trends. In case you missed them, in this post, you can find newly updated avenues to our Q&A sessions not to miss.
OpenStack Economics. In the big software era, understanding the economics of OpenStack is essential. That's a big message coming from the folks at Canonical, which is increasingly focused on OpenStack and cloud computing. Mark Baker (seen in the photo above) is OpenStack Product Manager at the company, and we caught up with him for a guest post on the topic. Mark's thoughts are in this post from this past week.
MapR on Microservices. It’s easy to underestimate the impact of microservices on today’s technology infrastructure. The evolution of microservices started as a bit of a backlash against the complexity of SOA and ESB practices. Over the last decade, there has been a strong movement toward a more flexible style of building large systems. The idea behind microservices is simple: larger systems can be built by decomposing their functions into relatively simple, single-purpose services that communicate via lightweight and simple techniques.
MapR SVP Jack Norris (seen in the photo at left) is an expert on microservices. We caught up with him for an interview. Here are his thoughts.
Meet the API Economy. How important are APIs in today’s digitally driven economy? They’re plenty important, and Paul Doscher, CEO of Restlet, has put some metrics on the concept.
Restlet offers a comprehensive and integrated set of capabilities to design, develop and deploy APIs, including doing so in the cloud, easily and hassle-free. We caught up with Doscher, who identifies himself as “old surfer dude” in addition to CEO, for a guest post on the state of the API economy. Here are his thoughts.
Big Data Drives Data Science. Databricks, a company founded by the creators of the popular open-source Big Data processing engine Apache Spark, has gained much momentum as Spark has gathered big backers and widespread development. Spark is one of the most active open source projects in the Big Data ecosystem, and there are increasing efforts among data scientists to leverage it and other open source tools.
We connected with Kavitha Mariappan, who is Vice President of Marketing at Databricks, for a guest post on how open source tools are driving data science in brand new ways. Find it here.
The Grappa Team. One of the most interesting new tools in data analytics is the open source Grappa project, which scales data-intensive applications on commodity clusters and offers a new type of abstraction that can beat classic distributed shared memory (DSM) systems. In fact, Rich Wolski, founder of the Eucalyptus cloud project, enthusiastically pointed to Grappa as a very interesting project in our recent interview with him. We met up with some of the leaders behind Grappa, who are based at the University of Washington, for an interview found here.
The SDN Trend. At the recent OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, there were several tracks and sessions dedicated to software-defined networking (SDN), which we have covered extensively here on OStatic. SDN has also been a point of focus for The Linux Foundation and many other organizations.
We caught up with Jay Turner, who is head of the CloudRouter Project, an open source project for network collaboration and innovation, for a guest post on the topic. Here are his thoughts.