Open-source software is no longer the domain of hard-core technology firms. As companies such as Conde Nast International Inc. and American Express Co. dip their toes into the community pool, major enterprise adoption is slowly becoming a thing.

“Having this concentrated community and source of information, I think the companies actually understand the value in that and contributing to that,” said Katie Gamanji (pictured), cloud platform engineer at American Express and member of the Technical Oversight Committee at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Getting the change going is the most important bit. Once it actually goes, it’s just like a boulder downhill, which is going to take everything around and re-factor it bit by bit.”

Gamanji spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, during the virtual KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 event. They discussed the benefits of adopting open-source for established, global corporations. (* Disclosure below.)

Open tools allow Conde Nast to replicate tech stack across the globe

When Gamanji joined Conde Nast as a cloud platform engineer prior to her current position at American Express, the media company was looking to modernize its underlying infrastructure. At the time, each business unit had its own unique tech stack. The challenge Gamanji took on was to unify them into a single platform, centralizing the deployment process of the application in serving requests but retaining the individualized layers for every single market to personalize their content.

“I was looking for something which aimed to introduce containers in the entire infrastructure,”Gamanji said. “So, it was a very good project for me to further go into the cloud native tooling.”

The project had Kubernetes as the gravitational point, introducing functionalities such as portability or flexibility, according to Gamanji. This allowed ease of scale but also the ability to replicate the tech stack and transport the platform to different regions.

“With Kubernetes, you have these lift-and-shift capabilities. As long as you have [virtual machines], or compute, you’ll be able to run the entire Conde Nast tech stack,” Gamanji said.

American Express looks to join the open-source movement

After guiding Conde Nast into the open-source community, Gamanji joined the team updating the heritage infrastructure of financial giant American Express. “My personal challenge in this perspective is to make sure that actually fintech is a thing, but fintech in cloud native, using open-source tooling is possible.”

The goal is to inner-source most of the configuration, according to Gamanji. “Historically, we had different contractors and vendors working with our bits and pieces,” she said. “We’d like to actually get all of these in house and have a centralized way to manage our infrastructure.”

True to her passion for open-source tools, Gamanji is working to ensure the centralized management will include cloud native technologies. “I think it’s a very healthy thinking in terms of technology,” she said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020. (* Disclosure: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither The Cloud Native Computing Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE