An organization based on donations will face austerity at times. Wisely allocating volunteers demands a constant reshuffling of the deck of priorities. That takes rapid communication that isn’t always easy within large, monolithic structures — organizational or technological.

The American Red Cross knows that all too well. It has found that less monolithic open-source models are the answer in both cases. “We try to be good stewards of donor dollars,” said Matthew Cascio (pictured), executive director of enterprise web systems marketing technology at the Red Cross.

The nonprofit body continually bumped into conflicts and impasses in its old monolithic software architecture — “a monster of a platform,” according to Cascio. “We’d always have collisions of priorities, not to mention the resource issues of who’s going to work on what at what time.”

Cascio spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer, chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference in San Diego. They discussed how open-source cloud-native tech has improved resource management and release cycles at the Red Cross (see the full interview with transcript here).

Give it while you can

Two years ago, the Red Cross got serious about breaking down its monolithic system to facilitate collaboration and project completion. Its technical leaders saw cloud-native technologies as key enablers. For one, they adopted Kubernetes, an open-source platform for orchestrating containers, which are in turn a virtualized method for running distributed applications.

Its new system runs on the Amazon Web Service Cloud. The team makes use of AWS cloud-native orchestration tools to help run Kubernetes clusters. Its various sectors, such as financial donations, volunteer recruitment and business, are now better organized for swifter decision making about resources.

“We can kind of separate out the risks for each of those groups,” Cascio said.

It has shrunk its release cycles from five months to two weeks thanks to improved communication and integration. “There’s a lot of conversations that need to happen to make that work,” Cascio said. Recent projects include a Slack app that allows users to sign up to donate or volunteer. 

Its tech volunteering unit, Code4Good, operates much like an open-source project, Cascio added. Its bench of talent chooses which features on its six-month roadmap they’ll work on and how much.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon:

Photo: SiliconANGLE