In recent years, Chinese developers have become an important force in the global open source system. According to incomplete statistics, Chinese code accounts for about 40% of the global open source community, and at least 20 million of the more than 60 million developers in the world are from China.

Open source is one of the manifestations of a company’s technological influence, reaching out to the community and other ecosystems to expand the application of technology, contributing to external needs while also enabling its own technology to mature.

In the past 2021, Ant’s technical students and developers around the world have been involved in the construction and maintenance of open source communities.

Among the TOP10 contributors of 2021 CNCF China, four are from ant group. In the past 2021, Ant’s technical students and developers around the world have been involved in the construction and maintenance of open source communities. Two of the technical students are primarily involved in Dragonfly and Nydus, two interconnected open source projects.


Dragonfly

Dragonfly is an open source cloud native image distribution system, mainly to solve the Kubernetes as the core of the distributed application layout system image distribution problem, 2020 promotion for the world famous open source community CNCF (cloud native Foundation) incubation project.

Nydus

Nydus is an image acceleration project initiated by Ant Group based on Lazy Load principle. With Dragonfly, P2P acceleration can greatly shorten image download time, improve efficiency, and provide end-to-end image data consistency verification, so that users can start container applications more safely and quickly. It is currently a sub-project of Dragonfly.

Xiaobian talked with these two students and the leaders of their teams about what they see as open source.

@ the Mo|Participated in Dragonfly open source for one year

Open source itself is a dedication worth pursuing

 

I started Dragonfly in 2020 and now work on the overall 2.0 upgrade. The maintainers of our project come from different companies and groups, such as AliYun, Bytedance, Qunar, Intel and Shanghai Jiaotong University.

I think the first thing to do in a project is to set standards, and when standards are set, it’s easier to agree on the results. Even though you come from different companies, regardless of the technology, you have different understandings of the code.

The ultimate goal is to be responsible for project quality, a cooperative and collaborative relationship.

At present, I think the situation of open source in China is mostly practical, and more dedicated programmers are needed to participate in open source work. Of course, in recent years, a number of technology start-ups have emerged in China, starting to invest in open source projects rather than just relying on the interests of programmers in their spare time.

Open source itself is a dedication worth pursuing

I started out as a programmer hoping to change things on my own, and doing open source also requires some technical conviction. Because open source is a free work, not a commercial thing, but hope to find breakthrough technology points.

As one of my personal favorites David Heinemeier Hansson(DHH) said:

“Writing open source software and giving it away for free has without a doubt been my most professional rewarding Endeavor yet.”

 

In fact, open source people are more tolerant, do things are more simple, all in order to do one thing well.

 

Writing code is not zeros and ones

Some programmers are idealistic. When they see a problem, they must point it out and fix it. I, for example, am not used to flawed things and will absolutely insist on the right thing.

Writing code depends on specific scenarios and needs. There is no perfect answer, but always push yourself to be close to perfection.

On September 9, 2021, Dragonfly 2.0 was officially released. It was the first open source project I participated in from zero to one, and it was very fulfilling and emotional. It took about a year from development to the first release, and there were a lot of issues and arguments along the way, but the day of the actual release was very happy and exciting. Our classmates are very helpful. We will keep on maintaining the project and build a standard solution based on P2P image and file distribution for cloud native scenes.

My short-term goal is to graduate Dragonfly from CNCF. In the later stage, I will continue to focus on cloud native scene mirroring and file distribution and further study the problems that can be solved.

Graduation means that more people will use it and the project will really start.

 

@ Jim|Participated in Dragonfly open source for one year

Build the global impact of open source projects,

Need standardization and industry construction

My daily open source work includes functional research and development, optimization of project performance, improvement of compatibility and stability, and code optimization. I also participate in online discussions in the community and spend a lot of time and energy in the Dragonfly developer group and online community, answering questions for others.

 

Participate in open source, not just use it

Participation in open source does not mean participation in the use of open source, but to be more active in the feedback of some problems, and try to make it continue to develop in a good direction.

For example, a project helps you solve a project problem, but the project has some problems that it doesn’t cover. At this time, we should not ignore it, or ignore it without referring to your usage coverage, but need us to go to the community feedback problems in time.

This kind of feedback can make the product better and contribute more to open source. Especially for projects that are used internally, some of the improvements are not made to the upstream community, so there is no way for the community to enjoy the benefits of open source.

 

Promote both standardization and participation

Standardization is important to make an impact on open source efforts. If a technology cannot be regarded as a standard, it is difficult to be promoted and recognized by the industry.

At the same time, participation is also required. Only when industry partners can use and participate in the construction of the technology can it gain recognition.

Pushing standards and participation is where projects thrive. For example, Google wanted to push K8s into a standard container layout platform in the industry, and spent a lot of efforts to make a good standard practice, which allowed the industry to participate in or agree with, and finally formed the CNCF community.

“All for one, one for all” promotes a positive cycle in the open source community.

I hope the open source project in China can be promoted to a higher level in community operation, so that more people can use it, create more communication and promote it to more people.

I also hope to push Dragonfly project into a graduation project through my own efforts, and do something more meaningful with other projects.

@ wang xu|Nydus team leader

More than 10 years of open source experience

Co-sponsor Kata Containers, OIF project

TOC member of Mulan Open Source community

 

 

Open source team management should avoid tying goals to data,

In case you win commit loses the community

 

I think as a team manager, the biggest challenge in managing open source is not business pressure, but courage.

I was always asked the question —

 

How to balance open source and business?

“Upstream first,” I said.

When you work upstream, you will always leave space and interfaces for relevant partners, decouple the project’s core functions and extensions properly, make sensible compromises and trade-offs, but never ignore the risks.

With upstream First, there is no irreconcilable conflict between business support and open source, or else you need to think carefully about choosing the wrong project.

In terms of goal setting, I do have goals to increase the impact of open source and cultivate new people. But when we look at it, we focus on whether this year’s work has really improved the quality of open source, rather than breaking it down into COMMIT rankings.

Participation in open source work, more important is not the number of assessment, but **** to stimulate participants’ innovation.

Open Source Team Management in my Eyes

In terms of goals, it should be a more “motivated” OKR approach, avoiding tying goals to data in case you win the COMMIT and lose the community.

From the perspective of process, there should be continuous adjustment and coaching to help the project adjust or firm direction and improve the team’s ability to participate in the open source community.

From the perspective of the way of work, there should be the same pursuit of the right way of work as the upstream of open source, so that the work of the open source community and its own business can be unified.

Over the past year, Nydus has continued to interact with other projects in addition to building itself and working with Dragonfly.

The Nydus team and KataContainers security container, which it leads maintenance, have achieved seamless integration. In addition, Nydus team also cooperated with Harbor, China’s first CNCF project and enterprise-level open source image warehouse project, which connected the full life cycle of cloud native image, and then cooperated with foreign developers of NEC to jointly promote the evolution of OCIImage standard.

Earlier this year NEC contributed Nydus’ Snapshotter for Containerd to containerd org as a subproject.

The diverse needs and backgrounds of the various developers in the open source community can help code unlock potential that its designers could not have foreseen when they wrote it.

Open collaboration is the value of open source!