 Hi, this is Yosemite Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of T3M, our topic of this month. And the topic of this month is open source. And today we have with us, once again, Billy Thompson, Solutions Engineering Manager at Akamai. Billy, it's good to have you on the show. Thanks for having me again. And today, as you said, the topic is open source and you and I, when we sat down at KubeCon, we talked about how open source enabled, commoditized cloud. You also explained what it means and what is the whole importance of portability. You folks are also among the first vendors to offer the whole, I mean, the whole cloud experience, even before the AWS thing happened, folks can run their Linux servers and back this was so easy, right? Just a lamp stack, Linux Apache or Nginx, whatever you want, MySQL and PHP, and you can get up and running these days. Oh, it's very, very complicated to just run a website. So which kind of brings to the point that you folks have played back in those days before Akamai Linux, a very critical role in kind of, I look at it as democratizing or making it more accessible where folks can easily just get up and running with these servers. So I want to talk about, you know, of course, I talked to Chris also earlier a couple of years ago, but look, if you look at cloud, how do you see that open sources kind of enabled the accelerated growth and adoption of cloud? What role do you see open sources played in cloud? Open source is responsible for the explosion of cloud computing. When you consider the open source web servers, Apache and Nginx that dominate the internet. When you consider the long standing open source frameworks such as Hadoop, you know, since 2006 that facilitate distributed compute and storage on commodity resources. And when you consider the many proprietary cloud based services that have developed since, most of which are built on top of or they are forks of or use some combination of open source technologies under the hood. So for that reason, I no longer use the phrasing open source alternatives. I say that I do consulting and architecting using open source technologies that provide same or similar functionality to those proprietary services because it wouldn't be right to call the open source solutions alternatives when the proprietary services are built on or in some way using those open source solutions. So to put it plain and simple, open source is what runs the cloud. And when you consider the origins of Linode, as you mentioned, being essentially the first IaaS starting in 2003, providing a platform that made it simple, accessible and affordable for users to deploy their own virtualized servers with open source Linux distributions. That opened the floodgates for cloud computing as we know it. And one example I like to share, I have a couple of friends who have been longtime users since the very, very early days. And they've shared stories where they went to Pearlcon where they encountered Linode and thought, oh, this is way easier and way more affordable and way more simple than what I've been doing, managing and running my own hardware and paying for space in a Colo Center. So they created accounts and they deployed their first cloud-based servers and they never went back. And they're still using those to this day and have been continued to accelerate ever since then, even as their use cases and requirements changed over time because of the flexibility and elasticity that that offered. Another aspect of open source that is critical to not only the adoption and growth of open source, but also sustainability, which is commercialization because commercialization plays two roles. One is not wrong. One is that it helps a lot of users because not everybody is well-versed, they don't have all the know-how to start consuming open source because a lot of players like Linode or Akamai, you folks offer commercial support around that. At the same time, it also funds a lot of projects because of commercialization. So it's a very symbiotic, very win-win relationship. So talk a bit about how you folks have dealt this commercial aspect of open source one by enabling users and second is by also helping projects sustain. So I think a good starting point for that is just to point out that open source is about community, which is something that Linode now Akamai has always been heavily invested in. So part of that investment is sponsoring many conferences, developer focus conferences, meetups, sponsoring certain open source projects, as well as hackathons that have been instrumental to creating some of these new products that become commercialized and become a huge part of the business world and being very involved in supporting that throughout that whole life cycle. So as we've been a part of this community over the years, that's where we've come across many stories as well as customers we've come to know who use the platform for development of open source projects, some of which have since become industry standard tools and cloud primitives that are used to power businesses across the board today, as well as the many hobbyist developers who at some point in their life were just having fun, but then got hired by commercial companies who then were able to help those companies make their transition and their adoption of cloud computing using that open source tooling and cloud infrastructure primitives that they came to know from our platform. How important is open source for you folks? It is a core part of our ethos. We are deeply rooted in the open source philosophy and movement. It's deep in our hearts and we will continue to serve that community by providing support to foster growth and adoption, enable it and innovation, especially by promoting portable, battle tested open source solutions that power today's industry, as well as support for those that are still developing, incubating and emerging. And we will continue to heavily influence the use of these open source solutions as means to avoid cloud vendor lock-in, which is really important for that innovation. And I'll touch on that a little bit deeper. By design, getting locked into a particular environment and only having access to the services provided within, by design that is more limiting than something that can use those resources, as well as everything else that's out there. So these open source solutions that as we talked about are under the hood, which is powering even a lot of the proprietary services, but then promoting that in a way that it can run across different providers so that you can be more modular and be more adaptive to the emerging trends. And that all comes down to why it's important open source and portability. Can you talk about if there are any projects, open source projects or foundations that Akamai is involved with? We support several open source projects, just to name a few, OpenFast, the serverless framework for Kubernetes, web frameworks and Go and Python like Hugo and Pyramid. We also support several open source focus conferences, including KubeCon, Free and OpenSourceCon, LinuxFast, All Things Open, as well as several hackathons and content creators, podcasts, YouTube channels, advocates, people out there who are promoting open source and educating and training others on it. Now, since you were talking about CNCF, I also want to talk a bit about the role of foundations because if you look at open source, there is code which is the foundation that is code which is owned by certain companies, both are right way to do open source, but sometimes when the code is owned by companies, sometimes their competitors are worried that, hey, they may get locked out, the license may get changed, or the company might have more influence over the code. So they feel more comfortable leveraging code base which is available through some foundations and there are some great foundations like Apache is there, Linux Foundation is there, OpenInfo Foundation is there, and these foundations have held accelerate the adoption of open source. So I want to hear from you to tell our viewers the role that you have seen these foundations have played in making open source more popular and it's getting adopted across the board. They are extremely important and foundation meaning that, you know, it's there to stay in the fostering so that that licensing, like you said, can't change, can't become privatized later on and I'm especially a huge fan of the Linux Foundation, just I feel that and I would say the same about the Apache Foundation, but with the Linux Foundation, especially they have a huge place in my heart and how critical I feel they are for securing the future of open source and vendor neutrality in this industry. There have been some interesting projects and advancements in the area of decentralization but the tech industry overall is very corporate and has a centralized model and rife with proprietary vendor locking products so something like the Linux Foundation and Apache Foundation are heavy influencers to keep open source alive and well in this space and in doing so in a way that fosters advancement and training of that open source ecosystem and a vendor neutral or vendor agnostic way and these ecosystems of tools and as you mentioned, you know, create that level of playing field that vendor neutrality so that all these commercial organizations feel comfortable using them because they're not using each other's products and it's just creating a more collaborative space overall. Billy, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this topic. Of course, you know, since we kind of live in our own bubble of open source because the viewers and everything, but sometimes it's very important to repeat the message to bring the message forward because sometimes we start taking it for granted. But you know, talking about the importance of open source not only for play of like Akamai, but also the role of folks like Linux Foundation, it's very important to talk about that. So thanks for this great discussions and as usual, I would love to chat with you again soon. Thank you. Alright, thank you for having me.