Celebrating the Year of the Tiger | Open source is the time!

Awesome SOFAer 👋:

Hello everyone,

I am the leader of the SOFAStack community - Qi Tian

At the beginning of the Year of the Tiger, I would like to represent the SOFAStack community

I wish you all a Happy New Year!

In the new year, everything goes well, and Huhu is angry!

Part 01 Open source is now!

Think back to 6 years ago, when I wrote the first line of Apollo's code on Github.

At that time, the domestic open source community was like this:

Dubbo has not been awakened yet, many well-known projects are still in their infancy, there are few contributors to the open source community, and a small number of active projects are maintained by the love of core individual developers for technology. Although there are many companies using open source products, making open source products is a very niche behavior.

However, in recent years, open source has suddenly become popular, and it has become a hot word in the technology circle, and has been frequently mentioned on various occasions.

The reason is that on the one hand, the open source commercialization model gave birth to a group of tens of billions of listed companies represented by Confluent, GitLab, and HashiCorp, which proved the commercial value of open source and attracted the attention of capital;

On the other hand, from the policy level, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" Software and Information Technology Service Industry Development Plan, which mentioned the need to improve the supply capacity of key software, accelerate the prosperity of the open source ecosystem, and build 2-3 An open source community with international influence.

Under the influence of these factors, the domestic open source industry has developed rapidly. The Open Atomic Foundation and many comprehensive open source communities represented by the Mulan community have been born. Many start-up companies based on open source projects have also received financing. The full list of statistics is as follows:

● In March 2021, Shenzhen Branch Technology API7 completed the Pre-A round (based on the Apache APISIX project)

● In April 2021, Kyligence of Shanghai Silicon Intelligence Information Technology completed the D round of financing (based on the Apache Kylin project)

● In May 2021, Beijing Sifei Software SphereEx completed the angel round of financing (based on the Apache ShardingSphere project)

● In May 2021, TaosData completed the B round of financing (open source IoT big data platform TDengine)

● In October 2021, StreamNative received Series A financing (based on the Apache Pulsar project)

● In November 2021, Beluga Open Source received millions of dollars in seed round financing (based on Apache DolphinScheduler)

● In November 2021, ByteBase, an open source database structure change and version management, received $3 million in seed round financing

● In January 2022, SphereEx completed the Pre-A round of financing

It can be said, "Open source is the time!"

Part 02 How to treat open source correctly?

However, there are also hidden worries under the prosperity.

Many companies have seen the commercial value of open source, so they have invested a lot of resources. With investment, they naturally have expectations for returns. In this case, an unreasonable KPI can easily make the open source action out of shape, and behaviors such as clicking a star to get a gift and submitting a large number of commits to correct typos are not uncommon.

On the other hand, some low-level open source projects such as Log4j2 are very important, but because there is no obvious commercial value, enterprises have no incentive to invest resources, so that only a few developers voluntarily maintain it for free, and everyone realizes it after a serious vulnerability is exposed. The foundation of the original open source software supply chain is so fragile.

So, back to ourselves...

How should we treat open source correctly?

My thoughts went back to 6 years ago. At that time, I was still ignorant about open source. The starting point of contributing code to GitHub was very pure: as a software engineer, I wrote a code that I thought was acceptable and solved the problem. For some general problems, I hope to make this code play a greater role, and at the same time, we can also meet friends through the code, and we can exchange technology and share our experience together. Wouldn't it be fun? As for how much influence and how much commercial value can be obtained, there was no concept at that time.

Now that I think about it, it seems that there is a bit of blindness and impulse, an impulse to share good things.

Of course, to do an open source project well, a momentary impulse is not enough. Friends who have done open source projects basically have a consensus, that is, it is very boring to do open source projects, dealing with issues and reviewing pr day after day, and occasionally encountering unreasonable demands from the party, a little neglect will lead to unreasonable accusation.

So what is it that supports me in investing in open source for so many years?

After thinking about it, it should still be interesting...

Interest in technology makes these repetitive things less boring, and through open source, I have made many like-minded friends. Everyone can talk about technology and life together. But it was a great conversation, and it was this open, fun community that kept the interest alive.

And this is also the open source concept of SOFAStack. We hope to maintain the original intention of sharing in the hustle and bustle, and create an open and interesting technical community. Through openness, more people can join in, and through fun, everyone can stay and continue to share and communicate, learn from each other, and grow from each other.

For example, in terms of openness, we conduct technical exchanges with you through various channels such as Github, Meetup, live broadcast, official account, and video account.

• In terms of community governance, we have also improved the promotion mechanism of the community and encouraged contributors to influence the direction of the community in different ways. Many projects such as MOSN and Layotto have a large proportion of external Committers.
• In terms of community cooperation, we have conducted in-depth technical co-construction with domestic and foreign communities including Envoy, Dapr, Seata, etc. In terms of communication, we have also jointly held several meetups with the cloud native community and the WAMR community of the Bytecode Alliance. Bringing wonderful technology sharing to the community.

In terms of fun, although we engineers usually seem to be very serious, we actually have a fun side in private. Therefore, our video account is also constantly trying new video formats, hoping to create a more relaxed and interesting environment for technical exchanges with everyone, and to learn and grow in happiness.

Things to do in the Year of the Tiger

SOFARegistry V6

Although SOFARegistry V5 has long been open sourced on GitHub, and its performance, capacity, and stability have reached a relatively high level, there are still many pain points in daily operation. Therefore, we have significantly refactored the V6 version, made great breakthroughs in performance, stability, operability and other aspects, and completed the full launch in the production environment (reducing costs and improving efficiency! The transformation of the registration center in Ant Group) Road), I believe that whether it is a small and medium-sized company or a large enterprise, SOFARegistry will be a more reliable option.

In the process of developing this version, we have also accumulated chaos testing tools for registry scenarios, and we will meet with you in the near future, hoping to help you better evaluate the capability limits of various open source registries, so as to choose the most suitable own product.

MOSN

At present, MOSN, as the data plane of Service Mesh, has covered hundreds of thousands of containers in the ant production environment, effectively solving our pain points in the independent evolution of infrastructure, and nearly 20 companies in the community have registered for use. Overall, however, the threshold for use is still relatively high.

Therefore, this year, we will open source a MOSN control plane product, so as to open up the use scenarios of MOSN end-to-end, reduce the difficulty of use, and benefit more users.

Layotto

As an important carrier of cloud native runtimes for the next five years, Layotto will continue to devote energy and work with the Dapr community to push forward API standardization and redefine the boundaries of infrastructure this year. At the same time, it will also explore the operation mode of Layotto on Envoy, so that only one sidecar can be operated and maintained to have the capabilities of service mesh and application runtime at the same time.

In terms of function runtime, we demonstrated at KubeCon last year that a WASM module is scheduled to run in the Layotto process through K8s standard semantics, and we will continue to explore more possibilities in this direction this year.

In April last year, the SOFAStack community had a happy third birthday with everyone in Beijing, which also marked the gradual maturity of the community.

We deeply realize that the sustainable and healthy development of open source projects lies in the community and every contributor in the community. It is every star, every issue and pr of yours that drives the growth of the project.

We are also pleased to see that nearly 100 new contributors have emerged in the community this year, and we would like to express our most sincere thanks to all the new and old contributors in the community, you are the most valuable asset of the community!

In the future, we will continue to cultivate in infrastructure, especially in the field of cloud native. We also look forward to colliding and communicating with more community friends, learning and growing from each other. Let us maintain our original intention and make the SOFAStack community more open and interesting!

Awesome SOFAer,Let's build the community together!