Awesome SOFAer 👋 :
Hello, everyone
I am Qi Tian, the leader of SOFAStack community
At the beginning of the Year of the Tiger, I represent the Community of SOFAStack
Happy New Year to you all!
In the New Year everything goes well, tiger tiger is angry!
Part 01 Open source legitimate next!
Think back to Github writing the first line of code for Apollo six years ago.
The open source community in the country at that time looked like this:
Dubbo has yet to wake up, many of the most recognizable projects are still in their infancy, the open source community has few contributors, and the few active projects are sustained by the passion of core individual developers for technology. Although many companies use open source products, making open source products is a very niche activity.
In recent years, however, open source has exploded into a buzzword in tech circles, being mentioned frequently in various contexts.
The reasons are as follows: on the one hand, the commercialization model of open source has given birth to a group of listed companies represented by Confluent, GitLab and HashiCorp worth ten billion DOLLARS, which has proved the commercial value of open source and attracted the attention of capital.
On the other hand, from the policy level, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the “14th Five-year Plan for the Development of Software and Information Technology Services”, which mentioned to improve the supply capacity of key software, accelerate the prosperity of open source ecology, and build 2-3 open source communities with international influence.
Under the stimulation of these factors, the domestic open source industry has developed rapidly, with the birth of The Open Atom Foundation and many comprehensive open source communities represented by Mulan Community, and many start-ups based on open source projects have also obtained financing. The incomplete statistics are as follows:
● March 2021 Shenzhen Branch Technology API7 completed pre-A round (based on Apache APISIX project)
● In April 2021, Shanghai Kyligence Completed round D financing (based on Apache Kylin project)
● May 2021 SphereEx Beijing Completed angel round financing (based on Apache ShardingSphere project)
● May 2021, TaosData completes round B financing (TDengine, open source Big data platform for Internet of Things)
● StreamNative received Series A funding in October 2021 (based on Apache Pulsar project)
In November 2021, Beluga received a multi-million dollar seed round (based on Apache DolphinScheduler)
● November 2021 ByteBase raised a $3 million seed round for open source database structure change and version management
● SphereEx closed A pre-A round in January 2022
You can say, “Open source is right now!”
Part 02 How to treat Open Source correctly?
However, there are also hidden worries.
Many enterprises see the commercial value of open source, so they have invested a lot of resources, with the investment of natural return expectations. In this case, an unreasonable KPI can easily derail open source actions, such as hitting star to get gifts, or committing a large number of typos.
On the other hand, some underlying open source projects such as Log4j2, although very important, have no obvious commercial value, and enterprises have no motivation to invest resources. As a result, only a few developers are free to maintain them voluntarily. After serious bugs are exposed, people realize that the foundation of the open source software supply chain is so fragile.
So, back to ourselves…
How should open source be treated properly?
My mind goes back to six years ago, when I was new to open source, and my motivation for contributing code to GitHub was pure: As a software engineer, I write a code that I think is acceptable, and solve some common problems. I hope to make this code play a greater role. At the same time, I can meet friends through the code, and we can exchange technology and share experience together. There was no idea how much impact it would have, how much commercial value it would have.
Now that I think about it, there seems to have been a kind of blindness and impulsiveness, an impulse to share good things.
Of course, it takes more than impulse to do open source projects well. Friends who have done open source projects basically have a consensus that it is very boring to do open source projects. They deal with issues and review PR day after day, and sometimes they meet unreasonable demands. Even if they are slight, they will get groundless accusations.
So what has kept me going for so many years?
After thinking about it, I should still be interested in it.
Interest in the technology to make these repetitive things seem not so boring, and through open source and to make a lot of like-minded friends, everybody together can chat technology, life can also chat, although in all over the world, even never met, but a meeting, it is open and interesting community interest to keep fresh.
That’s what SOFAStack is all about. We want to create an open and fun technology community in the midst of all the noise. Let more people join in through openness, let people stay and continue to share, communicate, learn from each other and grow from each other through fun.
For example, in terms of opening up, we communicate with people through Github, Meetup, live broadcast, official account, video account and other channels.
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In terms of community governance, we have also improved the promotion mechanism of the community and encouraged contributors to influence the direction of the community in different forms. Many projects, such as MOSN and Layotto, have a large proportion of external committers.
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In terms of community cooperation, we have carried out in-depth technology cooperation with Envoy, Dapr, Seata and other domestic and international communities. In terms of communication, we have also jointly held a number of meetups with cloud Native community and WAMR community of Bytecode Consortium, bringing wonderful technology sharing to the community.
And on the fun side, although we engineers usually seem to be serious, we’re all secretly playful. Therefore, our video number is also constantly trying new video forms, hoping to create a more relaxed and interesting environment for technical exchanges with everyone, learning and growing in happiness.
A few things to do in the Year of the Tiger
SOFARegistry V6
Although SOFARegistry V5 has been open source on GitHub for a long time and has achieved high performance, capacity, and stability, there are still some pain points in daily operation. Therefore, we have done a significant reconstruction of V6 version, which has made great breakthroughs in performance, stability, operation and maintenance, and completed the full launch in the production environment (cost reduction and efficiency improvement! We believe that SOFARegistry is a reliable choice for both small and medium sized companies and large enterprises.
In the process of developing this version, we have also developed a chaos testing tool for registry scenarios, which will be available in the near future to help you better evaluate the limitations of various open source registries so that you can choose the best product for you.
MOSN
MOSN, as the data surface of Service Mesh, has covered hundreds of thousands of containers in ant production environments, effectively solving our pain point of independent infrastructure evolution. Nearly 20 companies have registered to use MOSN in the community. Overall, however, the threshold is still relatively high.
So this year we will open source a MOSN management and control product, so as to get through the use of MOSN end-to-end, reduce the difficulty of use, benefit more users.
Layotto
Layotto is an important vehicle for the next five years of the cloud-native runtime, and this year we will continue to work with the Dapr community to push API standardization forward and redefine the boundaries of the infrastructure. It will also explore how Layotto on Envoy operates so that a Sidecar can operate with both Service Mesh and application runtime capabilities.
In terms of function runtime, last year we demonstrated in KubeCon how to schedule a WASM module into a Layotto process using K8s standard semantics, and this year we will continue to explore more possibilities in this direction.
Last April, SOFAStack celebrated its third birthday in Beijing, marking the community’s coming of age.
We deeply understand that the key to the sustainable and healthy development of open source projects is the community and every contributor in the community, every star, every issue and EVERY PR that drives the growth of the project.
We are also happy to see that there are nearly 100 new contributors to the community this year. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to all the new and old contributors to the community. You are the most valuable asset to the community!
In the future, we will continue to work in infrastructure, especially cloud native field, and look forward to collision and communication with more friends in the community, learning from each other and growing each other. Let’s keep our original intention and build SOFAStack community more open and interesting together!
Awesome SOFAer,Let’s build the community together!