When 90% of IT leaders say they are using enterprise open source, it’s a sign of a technology wave that will continue to influence the computing world for a long time.

The result has been development of an open-source-fueled startup ecosystem that works closely with many of the world’s largest tech providers to build new products and services on top of deep, established cloud platforms. This has, in turn, led to additional waves of innovation, as smaller, growing firms leverage the broad base of services that major enterprises such as Amazon Web Services Inc. can provide.

“This is unique; you never saw this happen before from so many different directions,” said Deepak Singh (pictured), vice president of compute services at AWS, during keynote remarks delivered for the AWS Startup Showcase: Open Cloud Innovations event. “Innovation is just getting going, which is why we have so many partners who are all inventing and innovating on top of open source.”

Following his keynote, Singh spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, and amplified his remarks in a discussion about AWS’ participation in open source, how various projects mesh with the cloud provider’s business, and the important role of the company’s partner ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)

Contributing to the community

The scope of AWS’ involvement in open source can be seen in a weekly online update published by the cloud provider. Each installment of “Open-Source News and Updates” charts the company’s participation in various ongoing code projects. As is common with many large tech firms, AWS either contributes to existing open-source initiatives or develops technology internally that is then donated to the community at-large.

“Our default is to go with the open-source option, where we can open-source and it makes sense for us to do so where were feel that the broader community might benefit from it,” Singh explained. “When Amazon or Netflix or Meta build something for their own needs, the first question we ask ourselves is should it be open source? Increasingly, we are all saying yes.”

In his keynote remarks, Singh highlighted a number of open-source projects that AWS has been involved in. These include the Kubernetes controller Argo CD, the Rust programming language, the PyTorch machine learning framework, and Amazon’s Linux 2022 distribution based on Fedora.

“We work with a lot of people in the broader Cloud Native Computing Foundation community, as well as on small projects that our customers started,” Singh said. “Sometimes we feel that contributing to a project is super critical because it helps us build more robust services.”

Containers and microVMs

AWS has been especially focused on the Firecracker and containerd projects. Firecracker is an open-source virtualization technology that enables the deployment of workloads in microVMs while managing multi-tenant container and function-based services. According to Singh, AWS’ interest is based on its Fargate and Lambda serverless offerings, which run on virtual machine environments.

“Lambda runs on top of Firecracker,” Singh noted. “If you want to build your own Firecracker-based at-scale service, you can have confidence that as long as your workload fits the design parameters of Firecracker, the battle-hardening and robustness is being proved out day-to-day by services at-scale like Lambda and Fargate.”

Containerd manages the complete container lifecycle, from image transfer and storage to execution.

“We’ve been involved with containerd from the beginning,” Singh said. “Containerd underlies Fargate, it underlies our Kubernetes offerings, and it’s increasingly being used by our customers directly.”

The startup partner ecosystem has played an important role in the execution of AWS’ open-source agenda. One of those companies is Tidelift Inc., which is focused on building relationships with the maintainer community and providing a software-as-a-service solution for managing enterprise open-source components.

Singh discussed Tidelift in his interview with theCUBE as an example of how the relationships that AWS forms with startups become an appealing element for customers.

“Their goal is to make all of you who are developing open-source solutions, especially on AWS, more successful,” Singh said. “Increasingly, customers build their applications and leverage the broader AWS Partner Network. You can rely on those partners for your own business.”

An important element in Amazon’s long-term open-source strategy involves its continued development of the Graviton processor. AWS launched its latest version, Graviton3, in December, and Singh characterized the processor as a catalyst for companies seeking to build innovative new products on top of the cloud platform.

“A big part of what we’re doing is to make sure that Graviton is available to you on every compute modality,” Singh said. “Every high-level service that gets built on this now has the option of picking Graviton as the underlying compute infrastructure. There’s never been a better time to be a developer, independent of whatever you are trying to build.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: Open Cloud Innovations event. (* Disclosure: AWS sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE