On June 18, “Branch Technology”, the commercial company behind APISIX, the top Apache project, announced the completion of A series A+ financing of millions of dollars. This round of financing was led by Matrix China, followed by Shun Wei Capital and Zhenfund. This round of financing will accelerate tributary technology in product research and development, open source community, ecological construction and internationalization direction.
SegmentFault has an exclusive interview with Branch Technology founder and CEO, Apache PPMC Wen Ming, to talk about his understanding of open source and commercialization, and the latest developments and future plans of APISIX.
Photo: Ming Wen at Dev.Together 2021 China Developer Eco-Summit
Behind APISIX open Source: To be the best API gateway in the world
Branch Technology, founded in 2019, is an open source basic software company providing API processing and analysis. Currently, it has three core products, namely, cloud Native API Gateway, K8S Ingress Controller and Service Grid. The three products can be interconnected to form a solution. Help users to build network layer traffic processing and analysis under the cloud native system.
Tributary Technologies is also the commercial company behind APISIX, a top project donated by Tributary Technologies to the Apache Software Foundation that is a new generation of cloud-native API gateways, It provides rich traffic management functions, such as load balancing, dynamic upstream, gray scale publishing, service circuit breaker, identity authentication, and observability.
APISIX has been developing in the community through open source from day one. After four months of open source, APISIX entered the Apache incubator and became a top project after graduation in July 2020. Apache APISIX has gone through the whole process of incubation and graduation in a very fast way. It was the fastest graduate program in The history of Apache. Apache Incubator President Justin And Apache APISIX Champion Ning Jiang have described APISIX as “the best incubator program for mentors.”
When it comes to the reason for open source and donating the project to the Apache Software Foundation, Wen Ming said that it is related to their original intention to start their business, “to be the best API gateway in the world, and then help enterprises better handle business traffic”. But if it’s a closed source project or if it’s just part of the code on GitHub, you’re not going to get as many businesses and developers to contribute as you want, and you’re not going to achieve the goals you set out to achieve. A donation to the Apache Foundation is also intended to let more people know about the project and get involved in the community.
Apache APISIX is the world’s most active API gateway project with 4,128 PR submissions from 250 contributors around the world and a new release every month.
In Wen Ming’s opinion, the key to the prosperity of the community is not the usual operation skills, “the means and skills are similar to each other, the key is to be able to stick to this kind of long-term value of things”, from the founder to start to invest in the community, and maintain close communication with the front line users and developers.
On open Source and Commercialization: The vast majority of open source projects have no commercial value
Speaking of open source and commercialization, Wen Ming said “the vast majority of open source projects do not have commercial value”. There are thousands of open source projects on GitHub, but few projects can really be commercialized. Open source started out as a tool/project that I wanted more people to know about and show to more people, and I just opened it up. Only when the tool/project creates business value for the client enterprise can the project itself be commercialized.
In terms of software type, operating system, middleware, database and other basic software is more suitable for open source, such software usually has strong irreplaceability or enterprises have strong dependence on it. Application layer, alternative products such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop or much ERP software are not open source necessary.
Looking at the examples above, we can see that closed source does not prevent these companies from becoming very successful commercial companies. For open source commercial companies, open source is only a means, but in the end, it is also for the commercial value behind it. Therefore, open source and commercialization are not necessarily linked, and open source does not equal free.
Speaking of the “open source craze” in China in the past two years, Wen Ming also has his own views:
- Open source is hot, but open source is not a panacea for business commercialization;
- Writing open source into the “14th and 15th” makes open source “broken”, and more developers will understand and participate in open source.
- Open source commercial companies need to “long run”, two or three years after the boom fades, can survive is “true open source”, can really solve the pain points of users, short time “chasing hot” is useless;
- Open source now “a hundred flowers bloom”, the final PK or technology hard power.
From the community, remote collaboration, no overtime, technical people’s entrepreneurial management philosophy
Tributary Technology was first co-founded by Wen Ming and Wang Yuansheng, who worked together at 360 for seven years and were both big fans of open source.
What’s unusual is that APISIX and Tributary Technologies appeared at about the same time — a common practice in the open source community is for a few friends/colleagues to do an open source project, donate it to a foundation, get funding, and then leave to start their own business. However, wen Ming and Wang’s students were different. They took this direction from the very beginning. It took them only half a year to set up the company, write code, open source and donate to the foundation. The purpose of the company was to commercialize APISIX.
The community and the company came together, and perhaps for that reason, Branch Technologies has over 20 employees from the APISIX community who have great technical skills, collaborative habits and tacit understanding, share similar values, and recognize the open source culture.
The reporter saw tributary Technology’s recruitment wrote “support remote, no overtime” —
Branch Technology now has employees in 10 different cities across the country, working remotely. This requires a lot of time management and communication skills on the part of the engineers, and it’s not as challenging for a branch technology as it is for people who have been working together in the community for some time on GitHub, mailing lists, etc.
As for overtime work, in Wen Ming’s opinion, companies that study basic software cannot solve core technical problems only by working long hours and overtime. What they need is deep thinking and more frequent communication with users, which is the real “engineer culture” drive.
From the community, remote collaboration, no overtime, this is probably the technology people’s entrepreneurial management philosophy.
When it comes to entrepreneurship by technologists, wen Ming unexpectedly turns out to be a “motivator” — it is relatively risky for technologists to start their own businesses, and it may be a better choice to join a fast-growing startup whose founder is a technologist. “APISIX is a good choice,” he joked. “Welcome aboard!” (Resume: [email protected])
Related reading:
Apache APISIX have been thinking whether developers review included: https://segmentfault.com/prod… Branch technology CEO WenMing pioneer in China open source 33 people: https://segmentfault.com/a/11… Apache APISIX thought no community home page: https://segmentfault.com/u/ap… Apache APISIX warehouse of the project: https://github.com/apache/inc… Branch of science and technology’s official website: https://www.apiseven.com/zh