Episode 54: Kris Buytaert Says Open Source is About Collaboration, Not Tools

The industry continues to heat up with a string of recent open source acquisitions. In episode 54 of DevOps Radio , host Brian Dawson chats with Kris Buytaert, a Linux and open source expert and the co-founder and CTO, of Inuits , to discuss some of the current trends in open source as just one piece of the greater DevOps movement.

As one of the ‘pioneers’ of DevOps, Kris shares his background from web developer to early open source adopter and practitioner, to consultant and speaker. Since he discovered open source in the 1990s, Kris has been helping organizations adopt open source into their infrastructure and now speaks at conferences on how to do this at scale. This has since evolved into talking about automation and continuous integration and continuous delivery. Along the way he launched the DevOps Days – now celebrating its 10th anniversary - with Patrick DuBois, which has turned into numerous global events that continue to challenge the status quo and close the gap in software development.

With DevOps now driving economies, the question remains, do people really know how the definition of DevOps ? In his own words, Kris describes the global movement, which hinges on agile methods and early cloud adoption. DevOps is making it affordable to innovate and do the right things, but it has to be done right. He notes, what’s commonly missed is the emphasis of process over people when people should be prioritized over process. Kris stresses that the people element must be collaborative though. While the people in the DevOps engineer role, may want to be the superhero, true success is when everyone works together.

While the idea of open source may not be new, Brian and Kris explain that we are, in fact, entering a new world of open source. Today’s software developers want solutions that are easy to adopt and easy to work, which does require trial and error. At the end of the day, there are still a lot of organizations talking the talk when it comes to DevOps but not walking the walk. Luckily, there are experts like Kris in the world to guide us.

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Additional resources

• Learn how to make an open source project successful

• Watch a webinar on modern DevOps practices

• Discover how to get started with DevOps and CloudBees