At Instaclustr we’re strong believers that open source is the future of software. The key technologies we support (Apache Cassandra and Apache Spark) are open source and our management systems are built on open source technology. As such, we believe that it’s vital that companies such as ourselves that rely on open source contribute fairly to the open source community.

To date, our contribution has been fairly ad-hoc – contributing fixes for issue impacting our customers and other minor changes that came up as we went about or work. We’ve always planned to increase our contribution once the company reached sufficient maturity to allow us to dedicate resources.

We’re happy to announce that, as a result of fantastic customer growth we’ve enjoyed, we are making a commitment to have a minimum of 1 full time resource dedicated to open source contribution from now on. We plan to focus this effort on contributing to Apache Cassandra as well as related projects we support such Apache Spark and the Spark-Cassandra Connector. This base commitment will be in addition to other effort that we expend diagnosing and fixing issues through our tech-ops team that support our customers.

We have chosen to resource this effort by rotating open source assignments through both our development, tech-ops and consulting teams on a 5-weekly schedule (which aligns with our on-call roster). We feel that 5 weeks will be sufficient to allow meaningful contributions to be developed while ensuring the our team as a whole has an opportunity to develop deep knowledge in the technology we support. We also hope this arrangement will encourage everyone to think about how we can achieve our business goals in their home teams with solutions that contribute to open source. As our engineering team grows we will evaluate whether this rotation schedule is the best approach or whether we need to allow longer rotations or even have staff fully dedicated to open source.

We’re really happy to be making this step. Should you have any comments or questions feel free to leave them below or contact me directly at [email protected].