Things aren’t what they used to be in information technology. Legacy vendors, and even proprietary startups, have swift competition from open-source communities. The pace of innovation, new releases and updates in open-source is changing how IT teams build infrastructure and applications.

Bloomberg LP figured this out through a time-and-resource draining exercise readers are likely familiar with: building a data-science platform.

The company built the platform roughly two years ago. Once it was ready for prime-time, the ingredients inside had gone stale. The technologies had advanced forward in open-source communities. The company vowed that this wouldn’t happen again.

“Either a ‘we should go look and see what’s out there and contribute to that’ or ‘we should start it in open source to begin with,'” said Steven Bower (pictured), data and analytics infrastructure lead at Bloomberg. 

Bloomberg is hoping to be a role model to companies looking to move from proprietary to open-source software. It’s running its whole business with open-source software like Kubernetes — an orchestration platform for containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications).

Bower spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed Bloomberg’s shift to open source and the changing role of IT teams. 

Kubernetes arrives in the enterprise

Some may be loath to go all-in on open source if they’re attached to vendors’ 24-hour support lines. But open source has its own self-healing capabilities. Busy open-source communities tend to be quick about patching vulnerabilities, releasing improved features, etc.

Some open-source tools are rough and immature, and IT teams will have to know their stuff in order to use them. Others — like Kubernetes — are much more enterprise ready.

Bloomberg was busy building some infrastructure fit for thousands of instances of PostgreSQL, etc. Then it realized Kubernetes contained pretty much everything it needed, Bower pointed out. “What we ended up realizing is that we built something that looks a lot like Kubernetes but doesn’t work nearly as well for all of those different systems to manage them at scale,” he said.

When Kubernetes experienced a CVE vulnerability two weeks ago, Bloomberg was able to fix it that very day, Bower explained. For a company of its scale, “it’s unheard of to be able to deploy things in that speed,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE