What do free goldfish, puppies, and open-source software have in common? When the gifts come home, there’s actually a lot of time and expense that goes into keeping them all alive and thriving.

As much as open-source tools have been a major contributing factor in advancing the cause of technology for enterprise businesses today, it still takes a village to support these increasingly critical solutions. Many of the most widely used open-source tools sprang from large companies that had the resources and support systems to nurture them.

The highly popular container orchestration tool Kubernetes came from Google LLC. The open-source stream-processing platform Kafka was developed and donated by LinkedIn Corp. Cassandra, a storage system for handling large amounts of information across multiple servers, was originally created by developers at Facebook Inc. to handle the social media giant’s inbox search functionality.

The list goes on, and this dynamic represents a business opportunity for any company willing to step in and help customers adopt and nurture the free puppy of open-source software.

“When those companies deployed these systems internally, they had a lot of supporting infrastructure around it,” said Tobi Knaup (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of D2iQ Inc. “All of that supporting infrastructure is what an enterprise also needs to develop in order to adopt open-source software, and that’s a big part of what we do.”

Knaup spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the D2iQ Journey to Cloud Native event in San Francisco. During the event, Frick also interviewed Chandler Hoisington, senior vice president of engineering and product at D2iQ, and Brian Kenyon, chief strategy officer at the company. They discussed the company’s recent rebranding, new releases from D2iQ in 2019, the need for expertise in open-source security, and the evolving role of machine-learning tools to help customers in cloud-native environments (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the complete video interview with Knaup below:

Focus on day 2

D2iQ was rebranded from Mesosphere in 2019. The firm’s original name was based on Mesos, an open-source project developed in 2009 by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley to manage computer clusters.

The recent name change reflected the company’s focus on more than just support for Mesos or Kubernetes. The goal was now to help businesses navigate the complicated and time-consuming work to operationalize a wide range of open-source tools.

“Day 0 is when you played around and tested things, and day 1 is when you got it installed and stood it up,” Kenyon explained. “Day 2 is when you really focused on the operations. How do I make this enterprise ready? All of that happened on day 2 and after.”

As evidenced by D2iQ’s evolving product portfolio, there’s a lot that still needs to happen from day 2 and beyond. After pulling in technology and launching initial production, cloud deployments can quickly involve making decisions on monitoring tools or log management. And that’s just the beginning.

“What container runtime do I want with Kubernetes?” Hoisington asked. “That one decision could take months if you’re not familiar with it.”

To help ease the cloud-native transition, D2iQ has accompanied its rebranding with a set of newly announced tools. Kubernetes Universal Declarative Operator, or KUDO,  version 0.2 was released in June as a way to build production-grade Kubernetes Operators for the application lifecycle. The firm also launched an updated version of its distributed operating platform — DC/OS 2.0 — last month.

Kommander was just announced to provide federated multi-cluster management and governance for any cloud or on-premises Kubernetes distribution. The new tool will soon be joined by Dispatch, designed to deliver continuous integration/continuous deployment for developers’ new code.

And there is Konvoy, a tool designed to vastly simplify Kubernetes installations.

“Kubernetes itself is great, but it needs a lot of pieces to actually get it ready for prime time,” Hoisington said. “Here is your enterprise ready-to-go Kubernetes distribution right out of the box.”

Expertise in security

In addition to helping organizations with the challenges of cloud-native deployment, D2iQ also believes that its solutions will address another critical need: expertise in using open-source tools.

“People move on to the next thing and the next thing in the open-source community,” Kenyon noted. “Organizations that want to leverage innovation, want to focus their operations on open-source — whether for cost savings or time to market — find themselves a couple of years later looking at code that’s been abandoned.”

This challenge was spotlighted in the security field when the Heartbleed vulnerability was injected into the OpenSSL crypto library and discovered in 2014. The virus exposed encryption keys by weakening the security of the internet’s most common protocols of SSL and TSL.

Security researchers scrambled to patch the vulnerability in 2014, but there are still unpatched systems today.

“For one of the largest SSL libraries used across the entire security landscape, there were two people in the world maintaining that code,” Kenyon said. “We want to stop that now for organizations that want to use open source.”

Watch the complete video interview with Kenyon below:

Machine learning a priority

One potential future opportunity for the open-source community involves the rapidly advancing field of machine learning. It’s an area that D2iQ’s co-founder is familiar with, having written his college thesis on machine learning and natural language processing.

“One of my top priorities is around machine learning,” Knaup said. “It’s like a hammer; you can solve a lot of problems with it. We’re seeing more customers adopt machine learning to do all kinds of interesting problems, like predictive maintenance in a factory where every minute of downtime costs a lot of money.”

Mobile tech giant Deutsche Telekom AG and its U.S. subsidiary T- Mobile have used machine-learning tools based on the cloud infrastructure managed by D2iQ. The German telecommunications firm is using machine learning to help customers optimize connectivity based on automated tools for performance and cost evaluation.

Meanwhile, there is a growing library of open-source tools becoming available for developers interested in leveraging the technology within the cloud-native world.

“We’re seeing a lot of the open-source best practices move over to machine learning,” Knaup said. “You can already see open community hubs spinning up where people publish models that you can just take; they’re pre-trained.”

Knaup’s company is looking to capitalize on the appeal of both open-source and cloud with the technology, training, services and support that enterprises need for the complicated cloud-native journey. In a fast-moving industry, D2iQ has rebranded itself to offer a wide range of options while anticipating what the next significant customer need may be.

“What customers want is the ability to move their technology and platforms as the business has the need,” Hoisington said. “It’s understanding our customers, understanding their business, where they want to go, goals for their technology platforms, and making sure we’re always one step ahead of them.”

Watch the complete video interview with Hoisington below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the D2iQ Journey to Cloud Native event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the D2iQ Journey to Cloud Native event. Neither D2iQ Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE