企业 IT 的开源最佳实践

由吉廷阿加瓦尔» Linux 内幕人士 » ECT 新闻网 2020 年 9 月 1 日下午 12：32 PT

https://www.technewsworld.com/story/86827.html

开源作为一种现象已经存在了相当几年，其根源可追溯到Tim O'Reilly，他经常在1998年通过在他的同名会议上介绍这个词和概念而得到赞扬。

自成立以来，开源一直被全世界的技术专家所接受，尽管一些大型软件供应商在早期就试图与它竞争。然而，随着微软最近购买了 GitHub，开源已经真正成为主流，甚至竞争对手也决定加入这个社区，而不是试图与之站对立面。

让我们来研究财富 1000 强和福布斯全球 2000 强企业利用开源软件为企业提供技术解决方案的五种方法，以及企业 IT 在根据业务需求采用开源时应考虑的最佳实践。

推动 IT 创新

企业 IT 的第一个关键最佳实践是利用开源来提高其组织中的创新率。创新的增加源于 IT 组织快速、广泛地获取技术的能力，而该技术在采用开源组件之前可能尚未获得。

由于开源组件的广泛可访问性，这些平台有许多贡献者。任何人，从个人开发人员，学生，软件开发团队到其他大型组织，都可以而且确实为开源库做出贡献。这种基础广泛的开发工作在开源软件平台中带来重大的创新水平。因此，采用这些开源解决方案的组织可从所有这些可用的创新中受益。

此外，组织能够探索超越自身企业能力的新解决方案和替代解决方案，进一步推动其内部创新。最后，企业可以通过采用广泛的开源软件来提高他们的创新速度，因为与商业软件相比，许可限制不那么繁琐。

这三个关键因素使精明的企业 IT 组织能够利用推动企业创新的最佳实践。这样，他们能更快地将产品推向市场。

加快上市速度

第二个最佳实践是使用企业 IT 中的开源来加快面向客户的解决方案和产品的上市时间。使用开源帮助他们快速适应利益相关者和市场需求的 IT 部门从长远来看可能会更加成功，尽管变革管理可能需要向开源转变。

组织使用开源更快地进入市场的一个好处是能够直接修改源代码，因为公司或其解决方案需要，而供应商开发的产品通常无法使用源代码。这意味着企业 IT 可以根据需要快速调整代码，而不必与可能多个供应商协商代码更改，并在队列中等待其代码更改，以使其成为供应商发布的生产代码 ， 所有这些都可能需要大量时间，从而花费企业时间、金钱和潜在的客户。

其次，由于代码质量，企业 IT 会不时地从市场上获得好处。通常，由于开源中有大量代码贡献者，因此代码质量相对较高。贡献者不仅以提供高质量的输出为荣（毕竟，这是他们在线上的声誉），而且开源社区具有固有的自我监管功能，开发人员使用和重用彼此的代码，这意味着弱代码被整个社区除掉。

最后，企业 IT 能够通过影响开源存储库中的路线图和功能来加快上市时间。由于企业客户受到高度重视和追捧，参与开源社区的人往往获得"最惠国"地位，即开发人员通常会优先考虑他们提出的代码增强和调整路线图的请求。利用开源加快上市时间的最佳实践是通过这些关键因素实现的，并为创建更强大的企业解决方案奠定了基础。

强大的战斗测试解决方案

第三个最佳实践是利用开源创建健壮且经过战斗考验的企业 IT 解决方案。在企业中开发 IT 解决方案的许多挑战中，确保其软件经过良好测试，能够承受业务中严酷的部署。因此，基于开源的企业解决方案的主要优势之一是能够在单个组织或其 IT 部门以外的环境中测试软件。

让多个公司、组织，甚至公司外部的个人测试软件，本质上提高了软件的强壮性和质量。因此，采用开源解决方案的企业 IT 部门可从所有这些外部测试中得到好处。此外，外部测试通常包括安全性和漏洞评估和补救，这意味着外部验证的开源解决方案具有比一家公司本身可以执行的安全测试和验证级别高得多的安全级别，甚至可能比内部开发的软件具有更高的安全级别。

所有这些测试，无论是功能测试、组件测试还是安全性，都意味着代码具有更高的质量，并且可能导致较低的支持成本水平。因此，此最佳实践的最终属性是开源软件能够降低支持成本，这不仅因为代码质量更高，还因为企业 IT 部门可以访问代码并自己进行更改。从而减少支持软件所需的时间和精力，而不必咨询、依赖和等待第三方软件开发人员或供应商为企业解决方案进行必要的更改。

此最佳实践的这三个特征不仅导致更高质量的战斗测试软件，而且使组织能够扩展其应用程序和平台的更广泛生态系统，使这些软件更加强大和具有弹性。

扩展技术生态系统

关于企业 IT 开源 的第四个最佳做法是利用它开发增强的技术生态系统。组织只能为任何特定计划分配有限的预算。这是每个企业的经济现实。如果其他组织也拨出一部分费用来开发通用平台的组件，那该怎么办？然后，每个人都会受益，进行这种投资的组织越多，每个人受益的就更多了——这称为 Metcalfe 法律效应——它基本上指出，网络中的节点越多，网络中每个节点的价值就越高。

因此，此最佳实践的第一个主要价值是，通过使用开源企业 IT，可以利用和利用为组织外部环境构建解决方案。这意味着由于这些外部发展，解决方案将更加稳健和有能力。

此外，此方法不仅适用于环境，还适用于解决方案的用例和应用程序。每个企业将应对不同的挑战、优先级和功能，因此它将以不同的方式扩展解决方案。这意味着您的企业将受益于解决方案生态系统的扩展，以涵盖更广泛的功能和功能集，而这会超出您自己的组织可以支持、证明或开发的范围。

谷歌的Kubernetes技术平台就是成功采用开源模型扩展其技术生态系统的组织的例子之一。通过开源许可证提供大部分产品，Google 迅速扩大了其产品的市场足迹，增加了其功能，并与其他提供商和产品建立了奇偶校验。

谷歌继续与库伯内特合作的方式就是在这个平台上建立差异化，以扩展其在这个领域的能力，并保持自己的市场领先地位。这种最佳实践对于组织开发增强的生态系统具有许多好处，但只有通过访问人才库才能实现。

提高技能并吸引人才

企业 IT 开源的最终最佳实践是利用它提高技能并吸引顶尖技术人才。技术领域存在人才战争，这已不是什么秘密。无论组织的地理位置、技能或成熟度如何，您都在与许多公司竞争，以争夺推动组织成功的最佳人才。

除了上面列出的最佳实践之外，开源帮助公司的方法之一是能够访问企业外部的工程人才。你可能会问，怎么会这样呢？在开源社区中工作的独立第三方和个人开发人员池是您的组织通过采用企业中的开源来获取的顶级人才。您的公司甚至可能没有能力或预算，以吸引和留住这种类型的人才，但您将通过开源获得和他们完全相同的访问。

然后，这将使您的业务能够增加您的工程团队和开发资源，超出您的预算承受能力。这种利用和扩展人才访问能力的能力是企业 IT 的关键最佳实践，有时可能难以吸引最佳人才，尤其是与"热门"互联网初创公司的"火爆"相比。

开源采用不仅能够访问此人才，还可能吸引这些人进入您的组织。众所周知，很少有初创公司成功，如果您的组织是开源的坚定支持者，那么当你开始吸引那些想要建立职业生涯的高层次人才，并且发现初创公司可能无法帮助他们成功时，不要感到惊讶。

最后，不要忽视这样一个事实，即开源还使您自己的企业 IT 组织的个人能够提高技能，并借助市场上最新的最新技术来重塑技能。每个开发人员都希望开发最酷的新技术，在有传统解决方案的企业环境中，这并不总是可以实现。采用开源平台可使您的顶级 IT 人才"插上 IT"的翅膀，发现新技术，使他们和您的组织受益。

Open Source Best Practices for Corporate IT

By Jitin Agarwal • LinuxInsider • ECT News Network Sep 1, 2020 12:32 PM PT

Open source ahttps://www.technewsworld.com/story/86827.htmls a phenomenon has been around for quite a few years, tracing its roots to Tim O'Reilly who is often credited with popularizing the term and the concept back in 1998 by introducing it at one of his eponymous conferences.

Since its early inception open source has been embraced by technologists the world over, despite some major software vendors attempting to compete with it in its early days. However, with the relatively recent purchase of GitHub by Microsoft, open source has truly gone mainstream, and even competitors have decided to join the community rather than attempt to compete against it.

Let's examine five ways that Fortune 1000 and Forbes Global 2000 enterprises can take advantage of open source software to provide technology solutions to the enterprise -- and best practices for corporate IT to consider when adopting open source for their business needs.

Drive IT Innovation

The first key best practice for corporate IT is to utilize open source to increase the rate of innovation in their organization. The increase in innovation stems from the ability of the IT organization to rapidly and broadly access technology which might not have been available prior to their adoption of open source components.

Due to the wide accessibility of open source components there are many contributors to these platforms. Anyone from individual developers, to students, software development teams to other large organizations can and do contribute to open source libraries. This broad-based development effort leads to a significant level of innovation in open source software platforms. Organizations that adopt these open source solutions, therefore benefit from all this available innovation.

In addition, organizations are able to explore new and alternative solutions beyond the capabilities of their own enterprise, further driving their internal innovation. Finally, businesses can increase their rate of innovation by adopting a wide base of open source software due to less cumbersome licensing constraints versus those of commercial software.

These three key factors enable astute corporate IT organizations to leverage the best practice of driving innovation in their enterprise. Which then enables their business to drive products more quickly to market.

Accelerate Go-To-Market

The second best practice is to use open source in enterprise IT to accelerate time to market for its customer-facing solutions and products. IT departments that use open source to help them quickly adapt to their stakeholder and market needs will likely be more successful in the long run, despite the change management a shift to open source might entail.

One way that an organization benefits from faster time to market with open source is the ability to modify source code directly, as the company or its solutions demand, which is typically not available with vendor-developed products. This means that corporate IT can adjust the code, on the fly as needed, instead of having to negotiate code changes with potentially multiple vendors and wait in a queue for their code changes to make it into a vendor's release of production code -- all of which can take a significant amount of time, costing the enterprise time, money and potentially customers.

Secondly, corporate IT benefits from time to market, due to code quality. Typically, due to the large number of contributors of code in open source, there is a relatively higher quality of code. Not only do contributors pride themselves on delivering high quality output -- after all, it's their reputation on the line -- but the open source community has an inherent self-policing function, exhibited by developers using and reusing each other's code, which means weak code gets weeded out by the community at large.

Finally, corporate IT is able to accelerate time to market through influence of roadmaps and functionality in open source code repositories. Because corporate clients are highly valued and sought after, those who participate in open source communities often get "most-favored-nation" status -- whereby their requests for code enhancements and adjustments to roadmaps are often given first preference by developers. The best practice of leveraging open source to accelerate time to market is enabled through these key factors and lays the groundwork for creating more robust enterprise solutions.

Robustly Battle Test Solutions

The third best practice is to leverage open source to create robust and battle-tested corporate IT solutions. Among the many challenges of developing IT solutions in the enterprise is ensuring their software is well-tested and can withstand the rigors of deployment in the business. Thus, one of the key benefits of an open-source-based enterprise solution is the ability to test the software in environments outside a single organization or their IT department.

Having multiple companies, organizations, and even individuals outside your company testing the software inherently increases its robustness and quality. A corporate IT department that adopts open source solutions therefore benefits from all of this external testing. Furthermore, external testing typically includes security and vulnerability assessment and remediation, which means that externally validated open source solutions have a much higher level of security testing and validation than what one company can do by itself -- and may even have higher levels of security than internally developed software.

All of this testing, whether functional, component or security means that the code is of higher quality and it may lead to lower levels of support costs. Therefore, the final attribute of this best practice is the potential of open source software to reduce support costs, not only because of higher quality code, but also because the corporate IT department can access the code and make changes themselves. Thereby reducing time, effort and energy required to support the software, versus having to consult with, rely upon and wait for a third-party software developer or vendor to make the necessary changes for corporate solutions.

These three characteristics of this best practice not only result in higher quality battle tested software, but also enable an organization to expand the broader ecosystem for its applications and platforms, making those even more robust and resilient.

Expand Technology Ecosystems

The fourth best practice with regard to open source for corporate IT is to utilize it to develop enhanced technology ecosystems. An organization is only able to allocate a limited budget for any particular initiative. It is the economic reality for every enterprise. What if other organizations also allocated a portion of their expense to develop components of a common platform? Then everyone would benefit and the more organizations that made this investment, the more everyone would benefit -- it's called the Metcalfe Law effect -- which essentially states that the more nodes in a network the more value for every node in the network.

So, the first major value of this best practice is that by using open source corporate IT can utilize and leverage solutions which are built for environments outside their own organization. This means the solution will be more robust and capable due to these external developments.

In addition, this approach applies not only to environments, but also use cases and applications of the solution. Each business will tackle different challenges, priorities and capabilities -- and as such it will expand the solution in a different way. This means your enterprise will benefit from the expansion of the solution ecosystem to cover a broader set of capabilities and functionality, beyond what your own organization could support, justify or develop.

One example of an organization that has successfully adopted the open source model to expand its technology ecosystem is Google's Kubernetes technology platform. By making large portions of this available via open source licenses, Google rapidly expanded the market footprint for their product, increased its functionality and created parity with other providers and products.

The way Google continues to succeed with Kubernetes is to build differentiation on top of this platform to extend its capabilities in this space and maintain its own leadership position in the market. This best practice has many benefits for an organization to develop an enhanced ecosystem for their platform, but this is only possible through access to a pool of talented individuals.

Upskill and Attract Talent

The final best practice for corporate IT for open source is to leverage it to upskill and attract top technology talent. It is no secret that there is a war for talent in the technology sector. Regardless of geography, skillset or maturity of your organization -- you are competing with many companies for the best talent to drive your organizational success.

One of the ways open source helps companies aside from the best practices listed above -- is to enable access to engineering talent outside the enterprise. How so, you might ask? That pool of independent third-party and individual developers working in the open source community is the top tier talent your organization will get access to by adopting open source in the enterprise. Your company may not even have the ability, or the budget, to attract and retain this type of talent, and yet you will get access to them just the same through open source.

This will then enable your business to augment your engineering teams and development resources -- beyond what your budget can afford. This ability to leverage and scale your access to talent is a critical value add a key best practice for corporate IT -- which may at times struggle to attract the best talent -- especially as compared to the "sizzle" of a "hot" internet startup.

Not only will open source adoption enable access to this talent, it might also attract those individuals to your organization. It's a well-known fact how few startups succeed versus fail, and if your organization is a strong supporter of open source, don't be surprised when you start attracting high-level talent who want to build a career and have discovered that a startup may not help them do that successfully.

Finally, do not overlook the fact that open source also enables your own corporate IT organization's individuals to upskill and reskill themselves with the latest greatest technologies in the marketplace. Every developer wants to work on the coolest new tech, which not always be possible in a corporate setting where there are legacy solutions. Adopting open source platforms enables your top IT talent to "stretch their IT "wings" and discover new technologies, benefiting them and your organization.