To the scowling, sleep-deprived developers sniping at Amazon Web Services Inc. for slacking on open source: AWS is fed up. It’s put together a team devoted to upping open-source activity and is steadily contributing new software.

“We’re getting criticized for not making enough contributions,” said Adrian Cockcroft ‏(pictured), vice president of cloud architecture strategy at AWS. “But we’ve been making more, and we’re making more, and we’ll just keep making more contributions until people give credit for it.”

Cockcroft runs the open-source team at Amazon. The team sponsors events, makes contributions, and recruits people from open-source communities into AWS. The team is getting busier all the time, and it just launched a few contributions last week.

Cockcroft spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and David Floyer (@dfloyer), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed Amazon’s open-source contributions. (* Disclosure below.)

Giving up goods in robotics, more

One recent contribution aims to simplify the often very tangled technology underlying robotics. AWS RoboMaker is a sort of extension of Amazon SageMaker — a managed platform for quickly building, training and deploying machine learning models.

“It wraps the intelligence you can build with SageMaker with the Robotic Operating System that has a library of actuators and a library of … control algorithms,” Cockcroft said. “You put a little brain in the middle, and you’ve got a new robot that does something.”

Another contribution is Firecracker, a virtual machine monitor for secure, fast serverless computing. “It’s interesting, because it’s a piece of software pretty much no one will ever see or use,” Cockcroft said. “It’s the thing you run on the bare metal that lets you run your container … on top that lies deep down in the guts of the system — there’s this piece of code.”

AWS uses it in-house for its Lambda serverless compute platform and Fargate compute engine for containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications).

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE