Organizations are widely adopting and deploying open source technologies based on the value, cost savings, and flexibility these solutions offer. Open source has accelerated the pace of innovation to the point where enterprises today must decide whether to leverage open source where it makes sense, or watch as their competitors speed past them.
But while open source technologies have become extremely useful for enterprises and deliver an array of advantages, it’s a fact that they can also be incredibly difficult to set up and maintain, and keeping them running can quickly add to the operational burden of IT teams. Fortunately, one solution exists today to help take away these headaches from enterprises: The Instaclustr Managed Platform.
The Instaclustr Managed Platform makes it easy for organizations to deploy and manage the most advanced open source data-related technologies by providing the data capabilities, security, and the reliability companies need to scale these platforms.
SourceForge had the chance to speak with Instaclustr’s Chief Technology Officer Ben Bromhead to discuss the increasing adoption of open source in the enterprise and the factors that drive its growth. Bromhead also shares how the Instaclustr Managed Platform is supporting enterprises today.
Q: How, when, and why did Instaclustr first get started, what market need – broadly – are you filling, and what types of customers do you most typically work with?
Instaclustr CTO Ben Bromhead
A: Before Instaclustr launched in 2013, our same founding team led a startup working with high-value datasets. Doing so gave us extensive hands-on experience with the open source Apache Cassandra database for the first time, and we created Cassandra management capabilities required to support and deliver those datasets. We soon realized that other companies might have a similar need for the tools we had built up. Customers started using what we’d built in production, and we saw our Cassandra managed services were earning far more attention than our initial product vision. So, it was a pretty natural shift to focus our attention on meeting that market need – and Instaclustr was born.
Our customers include enterprises – across industries – that can really benefit from a fully managed platform to modernize their legacy systems and achieve their next-generation architecture implementations. As featured and advantageous as open source technologies are at empowering enterprises with superior agility, scalability, reliability, and security for modern cloud-based infrastructures, they can be tricky to implement. That’s where our platform, expertise, service, and support come in handy – in completely managing these transformations on behalf of our customers.
Q: Per Gartner research, 95% of IT organizations now leverage OSS. What are your thoughts on the way the open source market (and adoption of OSS) has grown – and what’s spurring this trend?
A: Enterprises have become increasingly wary of vendor/cloud lock-in and associated pitfalls of proprietary software solutions. These are real concerns that can ultimately limit a business’s abilities to adapt and compete, especially over the longer haul. In contrast, open source software offers a wealth of benefits that have become too numerous to ignore. First of all, the source code is free as long as you’re not using a commercialized version – that means decreased overall development costs, as well as the flexibility to experiment with intriguing new technologies without making a long-term investment (as proprietary solutions require).
Open source solutions are also often more innovative than their proprietary brethren, offer superior agility, and have dedicated communities that collaborate on the software’s growth and direction. Those communities also deliver greater security thanks to the larger number of eyeballs inspecting the solution’s transparent code. For all these reasons, enterprises and other IT organizations certainly ought to give open source options careful consideration. This may not have always been the case, but the time is now for enterprises to really take a hard look at what open source solutions can provide.
Q: How would you characterize Instaclustr’s commitment and contributions to the open source community?
A: Our managed open source services are delivered through our Instaclustr Managed Platform, and we’re fully committed to delivering only fully open source solutions. This commitment is rooted in an unwavering belief that open source solutions are the smartest choice for most enterprise use cases and goals – and it’s also a belief that is verified by the very real benefits we see customers realizing every day.
Instaclustr also actively contributes to open source projects, in keeping with our commitment to the technology. A recent example is the open source Cassandra operator we’ve worked to develop along with other contributors, which makes it much simpler for developers to use Cassandra on Kubernetes. The operator is freely available on GitHub, and we have provided open source support for Docker images. With developers flocking to Kubernetes and containerization – and many wanting to use the solution in tandem with Cassandra – this is another instance of the open source community recognizing and addressing a real technology need.
Q: Digging a little deeper into Instaclustr’s Open Source-as-a-Service managed platform, what open source technologies are currently included and what factors are considered whenever new solutions are added to your platform?
A: We currently deliver fully managed and hosted Apache Cassandra, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Zeppelin. When it comes to exploring new additions to the platform, our process really begins by listening to our customers and the industry to understand what solutions developers are excited about, and how they apply to existing needs. If a technology is seeing strong adoption – and customers tell us it solves real challenges for them and it’s something they’d like to see as part of our services – we certainly get interested in it as well.
Kafka has been a particularly great example of that, as one of our newest additions. From there, we consider how the technology meshes with our platform. It’s critical that the suite of technologies we offer works well together, and in a highly available and scalable manner. Technologies we add to the platform fit our criteria for integrating well, and support the overall platform experience we want to deliver.
Q: Instaclustr delivers each open source solution in its open source form. In an industry where it has become all too common for providers to repackage open source solutions into proprietary versions, why have you taken a different route?
A: I believe our fierce commitment to 100% open source technologies provides an important value to our customers. As you said, our managed services are completely free of any proprietary factors. In general, we run unchanged upstream versions of open source technologies, and make sure that any changes, features, or fixes get upstreamed back to the open source community. A core benefit of using our platform is the assurance of freedom from technology lock-in, zero license fees, and total portability. This also helps support enterprises that focus on maintaining multi-cloud agility while making the most of their cloud technology.
Q: Let’s zero in a bit more on Apache Kafka, the newest addition to Instaclustr’s platform. Why Kafka and how has adoption been since you’ve added it?
A: Apache Kafka is a highly available and performant distributed streaming platform. Thousands of enterprises use Kafka in production – the solution enables them to gain real-time insights from data, and to handle events quickly and at scale within their applications. Kafka provides enterprise architects with a particularly useful set of capabilities; it also happens to fit very well alongside the other core open source technologies on our platform. And we’re proud to have a team with deep Kafka-specific acumen ready to help enterprises optimize this technology. We are also providing enhanced security of the only SOC2-certified Kafka managed service available today, which fully safeguards data management and client privacy. Adoption has been robust, due in no small part to these benefits.
Q: In August, Instaclustr’s closed a $15 million investment round. What’s your strategy for using this funding influx? What’s on the horizon for Instaclustr over the next 6-12 months?
A: Our strategy over the near term includes expanding the core open source technologies available through our managed platform. We’ve actually already gotten that started with the recent addition of Elasticsearch, and others are on the way. We’ll also be active in considering, vetting, and adding additional data-centric open source technologies that meet our platform’s criteria for integration and an ability to deliver scalability, availability, and performance ideal for supporting customers’ next-gen applications. And we won’t lose sight of deepening our support for organizations using Cassandra; over the coming year that will no doubt include more work around our Cassandra-Kubernetes operator and related solutions. Last but not least, we’ll be growing our sales and support teams across continents!
About Instaclustr
Instaclustr is the Open Source-as-a-Service company, delivering reliability at scale. It operates an automated, proven, and trusted managed environment, providing database, analytics, search, and messaging. Doing so enables companies to focus internal development and operational resources on building cutting edge customer-facing applications.