2024-06-11 –, Maschinenhaus
Most of the foundational tools we use in this industry are open source. But CI/CD is a domain where open source has stagnated and most innovation is happening in proprietary code. This talk discusses why this is, why it's dangerous, and what we can do about it.
The CI/CD landscape is increasingly dominated by closed source offerings. This is unlike many other tools developers use. If I need an OS to host my application, I have Linux. If I need a database, Postgres. If I need to stream data, why not Kafka? But if I need CI/CD? There are open source options, but high performing teams increasingly choose closed source SaaS products. Even worse, closed source CI systems are the default option for most open source projects these days, leading to a situation where a staggering chunk of open source software is built by closed source tools. Paradoxically, you’re far more likely to encounter an OSS system building your organization’s private code than you are to see it building the OSS libraries you use.
It wasn’t always this way. This talk will answer questions about this: How did we get there? What trends drove this change? How can we fix this? Should we even care? I argue that we can beat this by focusing on better build and observability tools, over integrated CI/CD solutions. I call on this community to change how we think about our projects, so that we don’t end up with private control over community builds.
Josh Reed is a Senior Software Engineer in Release Engineering team at Aiven. He has spent the last 5 years of his career working to help teams achieve efficiency and quality in the development process. His motto is "Ship better software faster." He lives in Montreal, Canada with his wife, daughter, and cats. In his free time, he loves to play music, and to barbecue anything and everything that's good on a grill.