Author: Matt Asay

One of the best things about open source is its community. It’s the community that helps to popularize a project. It’s the community that helps to build the project through code, documentation, and other contributions. It’s the community that sometimes turns into paying customers, too. But it’s also the community that may compete with you. […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have exploded in popularity as enterprises have sought to make better use of their data. At the heart of these efforts is Project Jupyter, a popular open source project widely used in data science, machine learning, and scientific computing. Although Jupyter is beloved for helping data scientists do […]

Torkel Ödegaard was fed up. As a developer and architect, he says he struggled to get people on his team to instrument their applications and services and build dashboards to make analyzing and understanding the company’s application data over time easier. In our recent interview, Torkel says his former employer had a forward-looking microservices architecture, […]

Sometimes the best open source contributions involve doing less, not more. For example, Charity Majors has posited, “The best senior engineers I’ve worked with are the ones who worked the hardest not to have to write new code.” It’s not that writing new lines of code is bad. No, it’s really a matter of keeping […]

“The greatest force in legacy databases is inertia,” a widely regarded industry analyst once told me. Not superior functionality. Not better performance. Not lower cost. None of the above. Just inertia. Developers might say they prefer to run PostgreSQL to proprietary alternatives (and they do), but enterprises have spent years building data models in Microsoft […]

One of the most exciting things about the Rust programming language is that it makes infrastructure incredibly boring. That’s not a bad thing, in this case. No one wants their electrical wiring to be exciting; most of us prefer the safety that comes with being able to flip a switch and have light to see […]

Few things have changed the world more than the internet, and at the heart of the internet is the open source LAMP stack. LAMP, short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, enabled developers to build new, interactive web experiences that have changed the way we shop, communicate, learn, and more. In robotics, we’re on the […]

Madelyn Olson may not be the most well-known of open source developers, but chances are you’ve benefited from her work. Olson is a new maintainer for and a longtime contributor to Redis, one of the world’s most popular databases and regularly touted by developers as the most loved. You’ve used Redis when on Twitter, GitHub, […]

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. Visit the website to learn more. In a 2001 interview, Brian Behlendorf, then president of the Apache Software Foundation, was asked to identify the most foundational right in open source—the thing that, if removed, makes open source not open source. His response? […]

AWS was built for running open source. Since AWS launched in 2006 we have contributed to a broad variety of open source software projects, from Redis to Linux to Apache Lucene to Kubernetes, and will continue to do so as we seek to help our customers. Code, however, is not always our only contribution, and […]