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From the FAANG, Amazon strikes me as the one using most open source code while at the same time not having much to show as open source - firecracker is a (relat

From the FAANG, Amazon strikes me as the one using most open source code while at the same time not having much to show as open source - firecracker is a (relative) toy.

rstupek 6y ago
I'm curious why you'd characterize firecracker as a toy?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  It’s (literally) Google’s crosvm with some changes. AWS forked an existing codebase, made some changes that mostly consisted of removing functionality to tailor the VMM for their use case, and then made a big PR push about “open sourcing” Firecracker as though it was a project they built from scratch. The announcement devoted 1 sentence to the fact that it’s a crosvm fork, and that’s not even the only thing covered in that one sentence. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
  - whoevercares 6y ago
    Toy in what sense? It’s the backbone of most serverless offering from AWS.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      Toy in the sense that it’s not a significant contribution to the open source community. Edit: In comparison to the scale of Amazon and the scale of contribution of other similarly-sized tech companies. Firecracker would rank as a more major contribution in my book if it wasn’t a cut-down fork of a pre-existing (and still active!) project.
      - anaganisk 6y ago
        Define significant? If you're expecting every open source software user to push a million commits before they can be called "contributors" apart from Microsoft/Facebook I dont see any significant contributors.
        dodobirdlord 6y ago
        The context up thread is that Amazon contributes a remarkably small amount to open source compared to the amount of code that Amazon produces and the amount of open source projects that Amazon depends on. Also I find it interesting that you don’t think that Microsoft and Facebook are comparable to Amazon.
- throwaway7281 6y ago
  After watching a presentation on firecracker from Amazon team it seemed like it is more of a playground for their junior developers than some high profile library. Not trying to be dismissive, just an impression.
cosmodisk 6y ago
They must be laughing their sock off at the tops of FAANG: thousands upon thousands commit millions of hours to open source which they then run for a nice profit.
- blobbers 6y ago
  This is because reliability, ease of setup, and support are actually just as important as what is being run. If you're not using AWS you're not fully leveraging your software team, because that means you've got people spending time building and supporting these sorts of internal systems. That should only be done when you reach large scale, at which point people have leveraged other AWS synergies making it harder to exit the platform.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    >That should only be done when you reach large scale, at which point people have leveraged other AWS synergies making it harder to exit the platform. And then you're bleeding money!
    - pbz 6y ago
      And drowning in a sea of complexity...
      - barumi 6y ago
        I really doubt you have any real world experience with AWS if you try to sell it as a less complex alternative to anything,really. AWS is perhaps the most complex and arcane service provider ever, and is progressively getting worse by the way the service keeps growing and changing. And no, learning a specific AWS service is not a solid career investment. Tell that to anyone who tried to learn CloudFormation and then SAM and now forget everything because AWS pushes you to use CDK.
        pbz 6y ago
ravenstine 6y ago
Do they need to? The point of FOSS isn't to get freebies from big corporations. It's so that software remains in the hands of the users. If Amazon doesn't contribute back, or if they fork it, that's fine, because RabbitMQ will always be there.
pabs3 6y ago
Amazon contribute plenty to open source, both in code and in money, although they can definitely afford to do more sponsorship.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ctvo 6y ago
Firecracker has 13K stars on Github [1]. I'm not in this space. Why does a toy have so much activity (issues, pull requests) and stars? 1 - https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

From the FAANG, Amazon strikes me as the one using most open source code while at the same time not having much to show as open source - firecracker is a (relative) toy.

rstupek 6y ago

I'm curious why you'd characterize firecracker as a toy?

dodobirdlord 6y ago
It’s (literally) Google’s crosvm with some changes. AWS forked an existing codebase, made some changes that mostly consisted of removing functionality to tailor the VMM for their use case, and then made a big PR push about “open sourcing” Firecracker as though it was a project they built from scratch. The announcement devoted 1 sentence to the fact that it’s a crosvm fork, and that’s not even the only thing covered in that one sentence. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...
- whoevercares 6y ago
  Toy in what sense? It’s the backbone of most serverless offering from AWS.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Toy in the sense that it’s not a significant contribution to the open source community. Edit: In comparison to the scale of Amazon and the scale of contribution of other similarly-sized tech companies. Firecracker would rank as a more major contribution in my book if it wasn’t a cut-down fork of a pre-existing (and still active!) project.
    - anaganisk 6y ago
      Define significant? If you're expecting every open source software user to push a million commits before they can be called "contributors" apart from Microsoft/Facebook I dont see any significant contributors.
      - dodobirdlord 6y ago
        The context up thread is that Amazon contributes a remarkably small amount to open source compared to the amount of code that Amazon produces and the amount of open source projects that Amazon depends on. Also I find it interesting that you don’t think that Microsoft and Facebook are comparable to Amazon.
throwaway7281 6y ago
After watching a presentation on firecracker from Amazon team it seemed like it is more of a playground for their junior developers than some high profile library. Not trying to be dismissive, just an impression.

cosmodisk 6y ago

They must be laughing their sock off at the tops of FAANG: thousands upon thousands commit millions of hours to open source which they then run for a nice profit.

blobbers 6y ago
This is because reliability, ease of setup, and support are actually just as important as what is being run. If you're not using AWS you're not fully leveraging your software team, because that means you've got people spending time building and supporting these sorts of internal systems. That should only be done when you reach large scale, at which point people have leveraged other AWS synergies making it harder to exit the platform.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >That should only be done when you reach large scale, at which point people have leveraged other AWS synergies making it harder to exit the platform. And then you're bleeding money!
  - pbz 6y ago
    And drowning in a sea of complexity...
    - barumi 6y ago
      I really doubt you have any real world experience with AWS if you try to sell it as a less complex alternative to anything,really. AWS is perhaps the most complex and arcane service provider ever, and is progressively getting worse by the way the service keeps growing and changing. And no, learning a specific AWS service is not a solid career investment. Tell that to anyone who tried to learn CloudFormation and then SAM and now forget everything because AWS pushes you to use CDK.
      - pbz 6y ago

ravenstine 6y ago

Do they need to? The point of FOSS isn't to get freebies from big corporations. It's so that software remains in the hands of the users. If Amazon doesn't contribute back, or if they fork it, that's fine, because RabbitMQ will always be there.

pabs3 6y ago

Amazon contribute plenty to open source, both in code and in money, although they can definitely afford to do more sponsorship.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ctvo 6y ago

Firecracker has 13K stars on Github [1]. I'm not in this space. Why does a toy have so much activity (issues, pull requests) and stars? 1 - https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker