Amazon Web Services would not be what it is today without open source. "I think it starts with sustainability," said David Nalley, head of open source strategy and marketing at AWS in an interview at the Open Source Summit in Dublin for The New Stack Makers. "And this really goes back to the origin of Amazon Web Services. AWS would not be what it is today without open source." Long-term support for open source is one of three pillars of the organization's open source strategy. AWS builds and innovates on top of open source and will maintain that approach for its innovation, customers, and the larger digital economy.
Amazon Web Services would not be what it is today without open source.
"I think it starts with sustainability," said David Nalley, head of open source and marketing at AWS in an interview at the Open Source Summit in Dublin for The New Stack Makers. "And this really goes back to the origin of Amazon Web Services. AWS would not be what it is today without open source."
Long-term support for open source is one of three pillars of the organization's open source strategy. AWS builds and innovates on top of open source and will maintain that approach for its innovation, customers, and the larger digital economy.
"And that means that there's a long history of us benefiting from open source and investing in open source," Nalley said. "But ultimately, we're here for the long haul. We're going to continue making investments. We're going to increase our investments in open source."
Customers' interest in open source is the second pillar of the AWS open source strategy.
"We feel like we have to make investments on behalf of our customers," Nalley said. "But the reality is our customers are choosing open source to run their workloads on."
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The third pillar focuses on advocating for open source in the larger digital economy.
Notable is how much AWS's presence in the market played a part in Paul Vixie's decision to join the company. Vixie, an Internet pioneer, is now vice president of security and an AWS distinguished engineer who was also interviewed for the New Stack Makers podcast at the Open Source Summit.
Nalley has his recognizable importance in the community. Nalley is the president of the Apache Software Foundation, one of the world's most essential open source foundations.
The importance of its three-pillar strategy shows in many of the projects that AWS supports. AWS recently donated $10 million to the Open Source Software Supply Chain Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation.
AWS is a significant supporter of the Rust Foundation, which supports the Rust programming language and ecosystem. It puts a particular focus on maintainers that govern the project.
Last month, Facebook unveiled the PyTorch Foundation that the Linux Foundation will manage. AWS is on the governing board.
Colleen Coll 0:08
Welcome to this special edition of the new stack makers on the road. We're here at the Open Source summit in Dublin, Ireland. Discussions from the show floor with technologists giving you their expertise and insights to help you with your everyday work. Amazon Web Services is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally, millions of customers trust AWS to power their infrastructure become more agile and lower costs.
Alex Williams 0:48
Here, everyone here in Dublin, Ireland at the Open Source summit, I have the opportunity to have a conversation today with David Nalli. And David is head of open source strategy and marketing at AWS. David, how are you?
David Nalley 1:04
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me today.
Alex Williams 1:06
So I had a few conversations with you today about open source overall, we talked about what Paul Vixie discuss in our conversation earlier. And Paul is the vice president of security at AWS and also a distinguished engineer, and someone who is well known for his work over the past several decades in making the internet what it is today. But I wanted to get to this idea of what is the core open source strategy for Amazon Web Services? What are those pillars?
David Nalley 1:37
We know, I think it starts with sustainability. And this really goes back to the the origin of Amazon Web Services. AWS would not be what it is today without open source, we like everyone else, build and innovate a top open source. And that means that there's a long history of us benefiting from open source and investing in open source. But ultimately, we're really here for the long haul. We're going to continue making investments, we're going to increase our investments in open source, because it's it's important to us but not not just us. It's also important to our customers. So that's number one. Yeah, that's number one. I kind of hinted at number two there, right, which is that it's not just important to us. But it's important to our customers, we feel like we have to make investments on behalf of our customers. But the reality is our customers are choosing Open Source to run their workloads on. And whether that's open source databases, or open source, AI ml platforms. That's what they tend to be focusing on. They're choosing that repeatedly. And because that's important to our customers, we also have to go take an investment there make sure that that runs incredibly well for our customers. One of the things we saw news earlier about the pie torch foundation a couple of days ago launching and pie torch moving from a single vendor to vendor neutral governance, one of the investments we've made over the past few years is to invest in making sure that pipe torch runs really well on the ARM architecture. And so we're making investments like that, because those workloads are important to our customers. That's Part Two, part three is we've got a space where we have to advocate for not just the what's allowing us to innovate, but what's going to be the future for the rest of the world in terms of open source and open source gives us tremendous opportunity to get involved tremendous opportunity to leverage some of the strengths of AWS and bring some of those resources to bear and deliver on that to improve the entire environment that we're operating in.
Alex Williams 3:50
So I heard you talk about sustainability and how that's part of your open source heritage. And how we seen an investment in open source by Amazon Web Services is very beginning. I heard about another theme I've heard from AWS over the years, and that's support for the customer. And what does the customer want? And the third part I heard about its advocacy, and how important that is. There's also a pillar I'm curious about and that's how internally important it is to your own developer teams.
David Nalley 4:20
You know, again, AWS would just wouldn't exist today without open source. We're building a top open source all the time, whether that's directly or we're using foundational pieces of the open source infrastructure. And we are looking at, we're looking at open source as being able to stand on the shoulders of giants, yeah, to deliver so much faster.
Alex Williams 4:44
But what about the upstream participation?
David Nalley 4:48
So we're doing a lot of interesting things in in a number of upstreams. And again, a lot of our Upstream investment is dictated by what is being seen as important to our customers. But tell you about a couple of things that really have me excited today, we have built a top the Linux kernel and built a very small environment container runtime that's really stripped down and has a lot of memory safety controls in terms of Russ tooling. And what's that? That's called bubble rocket? Yeah. Okay. And, you know, we built that originally because we needed it. Yeah, turns out, it was also very useful to our customers, we released that as open source. And people are doing lots of interesting things. And it turns out, doesn't even require AWS, lots of people are doing interesting things with it. Because it is it minimizes the attack surface really well. But that's us releasing open source. And we love doing that we've got a number of things that we've released over the years, but we're also making investments in in upstream. And so we've got the traditional methods of support, where we're supporting upstream foundations and upstream projects with money and Cloud Credits. But we're also making significant contributions. So mentioned a few moments ago about improving arm support and pytorch. We've got dedicated upstream teams now for the rust programming language, that are working on improving the language itself and the ecosystem around it. We've got folks who are working on on Jupyter notebooks, and you know, their sole focus every single day is to wake up and improve only the open source project, we've got a team focused on on Kafka now and are doing a lot of things in the Apache Kafka community to improve that code base. What's more exciting to me is it's not just those things, but we're I'm hearing about a lot of teams that are starting to hire, and are building up dedicated, focused open source responsibilities so that they can spend all of their working day contributing upstream.
Alex Williams 6:59
That's amazing. People love that, don't they?
David Nalley 7:02
Well, certainly the folks who are hired into it love that they can go contribute back to something bigger than themselves, they love that we can have actual impact for our customers. And even for folks who are not yet our customers, you know, we can deliver improvements to those open source projects. And we're also doing, you know, doing well by AWS, because we're we are delivering innovation, even though we're delivering it to the upstream project,
Alex Williams 7:29
there's a lot there. I mean, for example, it gets, it gives you the opportunity to work with peers to I mean, you probably have friends who have like moved around to all kinds of companies over the years. And you get to an open source allows you to work with them in a way that almost transcends the organization who you're with. And of course, like you work at AWS, you're very dedicated AWS, but you also get to work with people from Facebook or, or Google for that matter, or any of the other companies out there that are contributing.
David Nalley 7:57
So one of the things that really excited me, I've learned about this yesterday, one of our teams over in redshift saw that one of our customers had built an open source tool to ingest data much more rapidly from from specific data sources, into redshift. And they were excited about it, they went out and talked to that customer. They're now collaborating with that customer to improve that open source tool. It's it's a tool for ingesting and shuttling data back and forth between Apache Spark and and redshift. And so not only are we getting to work with peers, but we're getting to work with customers where they are building tooling. And and it doesn't have to come from AWS, sometimes the best idea comes from one of our customers, and we get to go help them with that, and help them out in the public where not just that one customer benefits. But everybody in that environment can you know,
Alex Williams 8:54
I had a nice chat with Paul Vixie. Earlier, and one of the things you said and you know, we were chatting earlier makes me think of kind of what the work that you're doing now. And Paul did work in the 90s. You know, and since then, that really defined a lot of the protocols that we depend upon today, DNS, for example. And one of the things that you were talking about before was the VAT allows you to work on that next two to 3%. Those next layers up, what are those next layers up for you?
David Nalley 9:27
You know, so in many ways, I think we have traversed so incredibly far. And yet, we're still seeing lots of opportunity for innovation. For me database and analytics is a is a huge burgeoning sector. We're seeing a lot of innovation and how folks handle store ingest and make useful the data that they have. The next step in that evolution, I think is is AI ml, turning that data into something useful and doing so at scale. And so You know, we talked earlier about the pipe torch Foundation. And I think there's lots of interesting things going there. But I think you're right. One of the beautiful things about open source is that it stops me from having to do the boring stuff to focus on the most valuable things, you know, because no one wants to rewrite a web server.
Alex Williams 10:18
So maybe in the last few minutes, we can talk about the role of security then too, because data and security are bound together forever. Right. So the open SSF had a big event here earlier in the week. And six store, for example, is a popular project that we're starting to see emerge, your commitment has been to make a big investment in OpenSSL. And so I'm curious on like, you know, considering Paul's background, considering your investment in OpenSSL, what priority does security have, especially when you're thinking about the openserver, supply chain,
David Nalley 10:57
so at AWS security is job zero, it is the first place thing, if we don't have security, that is table stakes, and we have to have that in place. So when we think about supply chain security is obviously very important. We've been trying to signal the level of importance that we think we made earlier, this year, a $10 million commitment to open SSL, which is, which is one of the things that we're doing in that particular vein. But supply chain security affects not just us, but it affects our customers and the workloads that they may be running as well. So we've talked about a number of different avenues. Open SSL is certainly one of them. We've got a number of teams inside AWS security, that I'm sure Paul talked about, that are focused on securing the the open source supply chain, from a software perspective, and figuring out how we can move faster there to drive more value, not just for ourselves, but also our customers in the rest of the the internet
Alex Williams 12:01
with Paul abour. That takes on a different realm doesn't,
David Nalley 12:05
you know, to start, I'm really kind of in awe of Paul. I mean, he he built a lot of what we know is the the DNS system Domain Name System. And so I kind of feel like he is this rock star. And I'm super excited that he is working on security. One of the things that really amazes me is that he's one of those folks who very early on back in back in the 90s. He had software that was ubiquitous, it was on every device, it was consumed everywhere. And we're starting to realize that some other projects have that but very few have the kind of ubiquitous deployment that some of the DNS tooling and cron tooling that he was developing, has had over the years. And so he has experienced these problems firsthand. He understands the supply chain concerns and constraints. And I'm super excited to see folks like him working to solve that problem. Well, thank
Alex Williams 13:04
you so much for your time, David, really fun to talk with you about these pillars that AWS really believes in, around open source, the interview with Paul I think in your your reflections on the work that Paul has done, and the ability to build on that next two to 3% is really a we're gonna look forward to learning more about from AWS in the next year or two.
David Nalley 13:26
Thanks so much for having me, it's been a pleasure to chat thanks to
Colleen Coll 13:34
Amazon Web Services is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from datacenters. Globally, millions of customers trust AWS to power their infrastructure become more agile, and lower costs.
Alex Williams 13:53
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