Amazon is a customer obsessed company. 90-95% of our roadmaps are driven by customer needs. Open source matters to our customers, and so it matters to us.
In this presentation, we’ll talk about how we are using, contributing, and innovating in open source at Amazon to help our customers. Although this talk focuses on AWS, this approach applies to all of Amazon.
As a company we are customer obsessed.
We don’t lead with what the coolest tech is, what competitors are doing, or what delivers best short-term results
We aim to build relationships with customers that outlast any of us.
Our customers love open source and ask us to help them which drives us towards open source.
We contribute to projects that matters to them and help support innovation:
At times it is pre-existing projects that are meaningful to our customers e.g. Linux, Kubernetes
At others we innovate on their behalf and more pro-actively open-source e.g. Apache MXNet, Firecracker
At times we also contribute to our customers’ open source projects like Netflix’ Spinnaker project.
Healthy communities are important to the longevity of OSS that our customers consume. And therefore, we continuously look to increase our support of those communities in a variety of different ways.
Many open source contributions bubble up from within our teams as it helps them reduce technical debt and reduces maintance burden.
And in many case, we can also increase quality and security – for example, it was also beneficial to get eyeballs onto S2N, our Apache 2.0 licensed TLS implementation
- We contribute to a large amount of OSS projects across Amazon.
- These are just a subset of projects and our contributions accelerate.- We have a simple, streamlined process to make contributions which has made it easy for our engineers to contribute.
- We also support OSS communities in a variety of other other ways.
- Members of the Linux Foundation, we’re OSI sponsors, we sponsor W3C, platinum ASF members, platinum CNCF, we’re investigating what additional investments in foundations are needed.
- top tier sponsors for OSCON. Try and sponsor many other events.
We also engage online via social media, blogs, etc.. About 20% of blog posts published on our open source blog are by non-Amazonians. If you are building with OSS on AWS, talk to us using @awsopen and we’d love to host your blog post.
With that, here is the list of references for you to keep with you.
You want to learn about what we’re doing in open source, look at our website.
You want to reach out to us, connect with us at @awsopen.
You want to learn/contribute open source content, this our blog.