Many companies no doubt envy the all open-source elite — companies that chucked proprietary software in favor innovative, rapidly upgraded operating system technologies. But they don’t envy the work of the information technology personnel that must run it day-in-day-out. Combining the perfect mix of OS software for production in enterprises is still a pretty messy business.

“There is all this marvelous open-source software out there that is super-difficult to use for a great majority of people,” said Daniel Lopez Ridruejo (pictured), chief executive officer of Bitnami, a subsidiary of BitRock Inc.

Many companies are playing with open-source technology. They may have developers building new types of applications with open-source tools. But in order to go live in production with open-source technology, companies must untangle a ball of red tape, according to Ridruejo. Compliance and security around open source are particularly onerous, he added.

The tech industry has seen how standards and simplification can bring tech out of its open-source enclave and into the enterprise. For example, there’s Kubernetes’ open-source orchestration platform for containers, a virtualized method for running distributed applications in multiple computing environments. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation — Kubernetes’ home — has made huge strides in the past two years toward reducing complexity. This has spurred enterprises to adopt Kubernetes either directly or via a cloud service provider such as IBM Corp. or Google LLC.

“Things that used to be very exotic now are business as usual,” Ridruejo said. Bitnami wants to put more open-source projects on the Kubernetes track to make enterprise adoption easier.

Ridruejo spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host and cloud economist Corey Quinn during the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in Barcelona. They discussed the maturation of open source and what’s needed to increase enterprise adoption (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Ridruejo in its Guest of the Week feature.

Bitnami serves hot, instant open source

Bitnami began as an offshoot of Bedrock, which made certain types of software easy to install. The company realized many developers desired a means to easily install open-source software on the Linux open-source operating system.

“Over time, we decided to do the same thing as an open-source project for all those other tools and projects that didn’t have a way to make them easy to install,” Ridruejo said. “We started as Bitnami.org. We wanted to emphasize that it was an open-source project that was never going to be a company.” 

However, the Bitnami project soon realized the huge market potential for a smooth onramp to complex open-source software. “We never expected the success. It turns out that we went from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to hundreds of thousands of downloads,” Ridruejo added.

Thus, Bitnami.org spun out into a real company. There are now millions of developers using Bitnami, according to Ridruejo. Bitnami also began working with cloud providers. It drives a significant percentage of usage for Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud. With this foundation of fans and partners in place, Bitnami is poised to march forward toward major enterprise adoption.

“As the next stage of the company, we wanted to go directly to the enterprises in which we already have a lot of developers,” Ridruejo said.

OS gets dressed and goes to work

Bitnami’s pivot is toward production — seeing open-source software through the compliance and security gates and making it generally more business ready. “The core mission is not changing,” Ridruejo said. “We’re just augmenting that and going after the enterprise.”

Bitnami will be integrating more with Red Hat Inc. Enterprise Linux and OpenShift. It will also deliver more multitier capabilities, production features and high availability. 

Many enterprises are raring to adopt more open-source software. Sixty-eight percent of information technology leaders increased their use of open-source software in the past year, according to “The State of Enterprise Open Source,” a recent report from Illuminas Inc. sponsored by Red Hat, that surveyed 950 global IT leaders.

But some still have qualms about running open source “naked” or without enterprise-grade support. When DBS Bank Ltd. decided to transform into a technology company providing banking services, it brought some free open-source tech in house. However, it relies on Red Hat’s managed open-source packages for critical workloads.

“The really very, very high-demanding workloads and very secure workloads — we will always work with a partner that can wrap that into an enterprise-quality offering for us,” said David Gledhill, chief information officer and head of group technology and operations at DBS, who spoke to theCUBE earlier this month.

VMware hands Bitnami ticket to enterprise

At first, Bitnami determined it would break into the enterprise via an enterprise sales force. It was raising money to build a dedicated sales team, when a straighter, less costly route came into view. That route was VMware Inc., which recently announced plans to acquire Bitnami. The deal is straightforward: The companies are scratching each other’s backs to fill a gap in their respective strategies.

“We have a very big footprint with developers; they own enterprise IT,” Ridruejo explained. “We wanted to go to enterprise; they wanted to go into developers.”

VMware wants to keep Bitnami basically intact as the company it is today. Bitnami and VMware have partnered for several years, and the acquisition will mean access to VMware’s resources in addition to an inroad to enterprises, according to Ridruejo.

Another company VMware recently acquired, Heptio Inc., is also a Bitnami partner. Heptio products help enterprises access the full potential of upstream Kubernetes. Bitnami will now be doubling down on its collaboration with Heptio, Ridruejo added.

Ridruejo sees open-source technologies such as Kubernetes converging on increasingly simple standards.

“I started using Linux in ’93 when there was not even a concept of a Linux distribution,” he said. There was a dizzying array of different versions that came together to form Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Something similar appears to be happening with Kubernetes, thanks to the work of the CNCF, Bitnami, Red Hat and others. Eventually, the KubeCon event won’t be needed because Kubernetes will be so transparent and “boring,” according to Ridruejo.

“And there will be layers on top of that where all the action is or will be,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: This segment is unsponsored. Red Hat Inc. is the headline sponsor for theCUBE’s live broadcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Neither Red Hat nor any other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE