3Scale Launches Open Source API Proxy Providing Enterprises On-premises and in the Cloud API Traffic Management

3Scale, a leading Plug and Play SaaS API Management platform and services provider, has just announced the launch of a new Open Source API Proxy that provides Enterprises API traffic management on-premises and in the cloud.

3scale’s Open Source API Proxy is built on the NGINX Web Server, a popular, open-source, HTTP server and reverse proxy that currently powers a number of well known sites including Eventbrite, Facebook, GitHub, Heroku, Pinterest, TechCrunch, and WordPress.com.

The Open Source API Proxy when used in conjunction with the out-of-the box API Management solution 3scale provides, makes it possible for API providers to easily open and manage APIs without the need for programming skills and can take “less than 5 minutes” to get started. Additional benefits are described in the press release as follows:

Easily (and securely) open and manage APIs.
Launch APIs with the fastest time-to-market.
Keep control on their API architecture and.
Use proven technologies in the most demanding production environments.
The Open Source Proxy product site provides additional information about what is included with the 3scale/NGINX setup as well as detailed documentation.

The documentation explains how to setup the integration using “proxy mode.” Using proxy mode, integration with 3scale’s management platform can be done without having to make any modifications to the API source code or the need to re-deploy the API.

Source: Programmable Web

GitHub provides companies the tech talent

Because engineers and designers can post their work for all to see, more and more companies are realizing they can see what people can actually do, not just say they can do.

LinkedIn is so 2011.

In the red-hot market for skilled software engineers, companies looking to make great hires are discovering that relying on traditional services that showcase candidates' work histories -- but not their actual work -- is a great way to miss out on the best available talent.

These days, there's a new game in town -- GitHub, a place where hiring managers and recruiters alike are increasingly turning to find not just the potential employees who look best on paper, but the ones that actively (and publicly) demonstrate their capabilities.

Last month, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the hottest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, put $100 million -- its largest-ever investment -- into GitHub, a company built to facilitate the organization of open-source projects, and that makes money by selling licenses to commercial and corporate users.

Asked why his VC firm ponied up the nine figures, partner Ben Horowitz cited GitHub's dominance these days in being a central repository for open-source code. But he also touted the company's growing role as a place to find top-tier tech talent -- and, more to the point, a preferable alternative to LinkedIn.
"I was talking to my friend [who] runs a tech screening process for looking at engineers," Horowitz told CNET. "I said, 'What do you use for recruiting?' He said GitHub. I said why not LinkedIn? He said, 'why would I look at their resume when I can look at a body of work?' And since he said that to me, I ask everybody [what they use] for engineer recruiting, and everybody uses GitHub. That's a big deal. It means if you're an engineer and you don't use GitHub, you don't exist."

Every engineer and all the code

In Horowitz's view, GitHub has become a place where the hottest engineers are coming together to share their code, and as a result, the service is home to the most important project and collaboration tolls, as well as application life cycle management systems in the business. "They've got the ultimate advantage," Horowitz said, "because they have every engineer and all the code."

This assessment is shared widely throughout the tech industry. From small startups to established, household name powerhouses, GitHub is now seen as the go-to place to spot quality talent. To be sure, there are still engineers who will get Silicon Valley jobs without putting up a GitHub profile, and for whom LinkedIn is still an employment lifeline, and every company's mileage may vary, but a common view is that a developer who has a profile there has an advantage over those who don't.

At many companies, the feeling is that engineers who take the time to develop a GitHub profile and put in the energy to participate actively in the community can be better evaluated in advance than others.
"It's an excellent opportunity to see what they are passionate about, their coding style -- good or bad -- and fun side projects," said Will Young, director of Zappos Labs. "We love when developers see a need and just go ahead and code a solution to share with the community. We are looking for some amazing problem solvers on our team. This is hard to get from an interview or resume. But sometimes, we see someone's GitHub library and think, 'Wow, that is really cool and handy.'"

GitHub itself has been looking to its own service's community for talent, sometimes hiring people that may not present the most stellar picture on paper, but who show off stellar programming skills in real life. "Previously, where you went to college was the be all and end all," said Zach Holman, who evangelizes for GitHub. "The fact that that's not true anymore is fascinating."

Holman also said that internally, GitHub is seeing more and more signs that outside companies are using the service as an initial indicator of whether a potential hire is good or not. "Whether or not somebody has contributed to open source is a good indicator of whether they're a good engineer," he said.
Distinguish themselves

What's particularly attractive to the people who work at GitHub, Holman added, is that the service has become such a great way for developers to distinguish themselves, even as it got its start more as a place where people were sharing their work for no reason other than to do so.
But that sense of selflessly participating in open-source projects is something that is increasingly attractive to hiring companies. "I've heard some of our portfolio companies mention the number of [GitHub] contributions people make and how active they area, and connecting that with their credibility in the community," said Craig Driscoll, recruiting partner at Highland Capital Partners. "There's just the signaling that someone using those types of communities is a general type of qualifier...[especially the] frequency and quality of the contributions."

Indeed, some tech companies are turning to GitHub to identify potential new hires who aren't even actively looking for a new job, and who may not have a resume online. Of course, almost anyone getting hired is still going to have their resume checked out and their education scrutinized, and recruiters are still combing LinkedIn's millions of active users, but their GitHub presence may be the single-most important factor. "We're always looking for people who have forked a lot of [open-source] projects and contributed back into those projects," said Tim Milliron, director of engineering at Twilio, a developer of cloud-based communications apps. "We like people contributing into open source...That carries a lot of [weight with] us."
Milliron said that Twilio has been looking at GitHub as a recruiting platform for more than a year, but that the pace of doing so has accelerated significantly in the last six months. "If we look at 20 people and five have GitHub profiles," he said, "and one has [contributed a lot], then that person tends to bounce to the top of the list."

To be sure, GitHub is hardly the only open-source community that is being looked at by companies searching for technical talent. But in talking to people throughout the technology industry, it appears that GitHub is getting the lion's share of the attention. As Barney Pell, CEO of QuickPay, and the founder of Powerset, whose technology became the basis of Microsoft's Bing, put it, "Online open-source communities like GitHub bring large numbers of...developers together and are thus a natural place for recruiting."

Open Source OS X and TextMate 2

TextMate is one of the most popular text editors available for OS X, but the second version has been “on the way” for so long that many considered it abandonware. It turns out they were not far off the mark. Recently, MacroMates released the source code for TextMate 2 under the GPL 3 license on GitHub. Will releasing the code breath new life into the beloved editor, or has it been sent out to pasture, where forsaken code goes to die?

It could be said that TextMate and Ruby on Rails started life together, shot into the spotlight with this video. The video was meant to explain the power of the Rails framework, but also showcased the features of TextMate. TextMate was adopted as the unofficial text editor of the Ruby community, and through it’s plugin architecture was soon extended to deal with code of all kinds. TextMate sold well, and it’s developer, Allan Odgaard, promised in 2006 that TextMate 2 would be available as a free upgrade. Excited by the abilities of the editor, as well as the promise of free upgrades, developers flocked to TextMate in droves.

Unfortunately, time dragged on and updates on the status of version were few and far between. Five years later, the spirits of those who were still using TextMate were lifted briefly when a public alpha was released. The alpha was, as most alphas are, buggy, and not at all a successor to the original TextMate. Fast-forward to August, and the long awaited text editor is finally here, but not in it’s final 2.0 stable release version, but as an open source project.

This should be a victory for the open source community. A popular commercial product released as open source for programmers everywhere to adopt seems like the perfect end to the story, but it reminds me of another open source Mac project; Letters.app. Letters was intended to be the mail client that we all wanted on the Mac; open source, powerful, and beautiful. However, while the project did have a good sized group of developers, and high profile people involved, the project quickly fizzled out and died a quiet, lonely death as it’s leads went to work on other projects. The Letters project revealed one aspect of the mindset of Mac developers; that open source is great, but there is still money to be made with commercial software. Could TextMate be headed to the same desperate fate of Letters? Possibly, but this story also reminds me of one other project.

Quicksilver is one of the most fantastic Mac applications available. More than just an application launcher, it is a modern command line, a keyboard centric control station for the Mac. Originally developed and released for free by Blacktree, the launcher slowly started to show signs of decline as the developer started to lag behind as the Mac OS was updated. Late in 2006, Quicksilver was released as open source, and quietly abandoned… for a while.

In 2011 a small group of developers picked up the source code for Quicksilver and started putting serious effort into modernizing it, as well as fixing some major bugs. A new domain was bought, qsapp.com, and life was rapidly brought back into the ailing application. Today, Quicksilver is once again the gold standard for Mac automation.

TextMate obviously shares more of a similar history with Quicksilver than Letters, but will that be enough? Quicksilver was brought back to life because a small team decided that they really loved that application, and that because of that love they were willing to spend serious time and resources on making it the best that they could. Now that Allan Odgaard has put down the code, who will be willing to take it up again? Will TextMate fail and die like Letters, or will it flourish into new life like Quicksilver? Only time will tell.

Chaos Monkey released by Netflix

Chaos Monkey, the first member of Netflix's "Simian Army", has been released as open source code. The software runs on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform and can be used for stress testing cloud deployments. Chaos Monkey will randomly disable virtual machines in Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) and give the support engineers a chance to test contingency plans for outages under realistic circumstances. This gives administrators a chance to learn from the problems encountered. Chaos Monkey's schedule can be configured, but by default it runs during work hours to give the engineers a chance to be notified and react quickly.

According to Netflix, the idea behind Chaos Monkey is to make sure engineers and administrators are prepared for problems and can solve them efficiently when they occur. In its announcement, the company summarises the reasons for deploying the software as follows: "Failures happen and they inevitably happen when least desired or expected. If your application can't tolerate an instance failure would you rather find out by being paged at 3am or when you're in the office and have had your morning coffee?"

Netflix has been using this kind of approach for a while and says that over the last year, Chaos Monkey has disabled over 65,000 virtual machine instances in its network. In many cases, AWS handles these outages seamlessly and nobody notices a problem but the approach has also led to bugs and problems being discovered which could then be eliminated.

To make the approach less painful, Chaos Monkey has several configuration options. It can be used in both opt-in and opt-out mode; this is configured for each application the service is run on. This allows organisations to test the software without putting their whole infrastructure at risk. Administrators can also tune the probability with which Chaos Monkey terminates instances. Probability settings range from 100% (one instance a day) to 20% (one instance per week on average).

The source code for Chaos Monkey is available from GitHub under the Apache 2.0 Licence. More information on the software is available from its documentation wiki, which is also hosted on GitHub.
Netflix is planning to release more members of its Simian Army in the future. The next candidate will most likely be Janitor Monkey, a program that helps clean up unneeded assets from AWS environments and thus save running costs.

Cash For Code: Github Raises $100 Million From Andreessen Horowitz

Startup Github, which provides tools for programmers to collaborate on software code, has raised $100 million in financing from venture firm Andreessen Horowitz–the largest investment the firm has ever made.

The funding shows how software development has grown to be a major critical need of a wide range of companies outside of the technology industry. I previously covered how that trend has helped Github competitor Atlassian. Also participating in the Github round was SV Angel.

Github has more than 1.7 million developers on its platform and more than three million software repositorise. The San Francisco company, with 100 employees, has been bootstrapped for more than four years and been profitable, growing by word of mouth because of its popularity among programmers. Github has turned down venture capital in the past because it valued its independence. But Tom Preston-Werner, CEO of GitHub, says the company was won over by Andreessen Horowitz, particularly Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen and Peter Levine, who is joining Github’s board.

“We never found a partner who shared our vision with us and had a passion for software development that we do until we met Marc and Peter Levine,” Preston-Werner says. The startup, which has a strong focus on open-source software, also appreciated the partners’ focus on open source.

The funding will enable the company to expand into a number of new areas. “Github Everywhere” is the company’s strategy to get the service used for individuals, small businesses, students, universities and enterprises. Github’s offering for large enterprises is still in its infancy. Workings seamlessly across platforms such as Mac, Windows, Linux or mobile devices is also a priority. International expansion is on the agenda, as well as making Github more common for more programming languages. Right now it’s common for Ruby on Rails or Javascript, but the company wants it to be as common for coders writing Java or C++.

Finally, the company wants the service to have tools that are easy for non-programmers to use–such as technical writers, designers, or managers, so that they can easily find out what’s going on in a project.

Peter Levine of Andreessen Horowitz says Github has revamped an old technology category, source code management, by moving it all to the cloud. Github has also made it social, so that programmers often use their Github account as a kind of resume for recruiters. “By orienting around people rather than repositories, GitHub has become the de facto social network for programmers,” Levine writes in a blog post. “If you are using another programmer’s open source libraries, are interested in what she’s doing or just a fan of her work, you can follow her on GitHub. If you need to hire great programmers, why look at resumes when you can view a candidate’s actual work on GitHub?”

Github is free for people to use publicly to collaborate on code. The service has been popular for open source applications–and the company contributes some of its own code to open source. People only pay to have private use of the service, say for development inside a company. Github has a sales team but it’s not a traditional one.

The company tries to get people at a company to use the service first for open source or their own personal projects for free, hoping they will then ask their managers to buy Github for the company. In a way it’s similar to the freemium model of companies like Dropbox. Sales people are not paid on the typical commission basis at Github so that they focus on selling only what is the best for each customer, not just on making the most money. ”We want the decisions to come from customers not a heavy sales process,” Preston-Werner says. “We want to make the best product possible and have it sell itself.”

Github can also be used for people to collaborate on non-technical projects. Preston-Werner even used it to post a list of top vegetarian restaurants in San Francisco, which others have also added to.

Github differentiates from others such as Accel Partners-backed Atlassian by focusing on open source, Preston-Werner says. “When we got started we were the only ones doing collaborative tools around open source,” he says. Github also is different from Atlassian because it has built all of its tools internally rather than doing acquisitions, he adds.

Eucalyptus Moves to GitHub

Eucalyptus Systems has updated its IaaS (infrastructure as a platform) cloud computing software so that computing jobs may be started more easily.

The open source Eucalyptus 3.1, to be released June 27, will also be the first version to be available on the GitHub online repository of open source software, providing a central place for developers to work on the code.

Developed by a University of California researcher, Eucalyptus is a cloud software platform that reproduces the Amazon Web Services API (application programming interface). With this software, organizations could duplicate AWS internally, allowing them to move jobs easily between Amazon and an in-house system. In March, Amazon announced that it would support development of Eucalyptus.

This release builds on version 3.0, released last August. It's the first to come with FastStart, a provisioning service that allows an administrator to get a cloud computing job running within 20 minutes, the company claims. Virtual machines are kept in a library so they can be easily deployed. The software also includes a suite of installation tools, called SilverEye, for advance installation and configuration of the virtual images. FastStart works on CentOS 5 Linux distribution with the Xen hypervisor, or CentOS 6 with Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

This version of the software has been updated to work with the latest versions of other platforms as well. It can now run on the latest version of with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), allowing users to deploy either Xen or KVM-based virtual machines on RHEL servers. Users can run Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) services on RHEL. Eucalyptus 3.1 has also been engineered to work with VMware's virtualization management software, vCenter version 5.

The move to GitHub should bring more community participation in the further development of the software, the company predicts. Eucalyptus Systems sells an enterprise version of the software with additional proprietary management features, though the company also shepherds the development of the open-source core of the program, called Eucalyptus Community Cloud. Placing the codebase on GitHub will centralize the development activity in one public location, as well as allow Eucalyptus users to file requests for new features and bug fixes, and watch their progress through the development cycle. Defects and new features will be tracked with a copy of the Jira project tracker.

Internal C++ libraries launched by Facebook as Open Source

Facebook is liberating a large collection of libraries that it uses internally for C++ development. The code is available from a public GitHub repository where it is distributed as open source under the permissive Apache Software License.

The assortment of frameworks is collectively called Folly, the Facebook Open Source Library. Its individual components support a diverse spectrum of capabilities, ranging from general-purpose programming functionality to more specialized pieces that are designed to help developers wring extra performance out of complex applications.

Among many other things, the Folly libraries simplify concurrency, string formatting, JSON manipulation, benchmarking, and iterating over collections. They also offer optimized drop-in replacements for several C++ standard library classes, including std::string.

As I learned when I visited Facebook’s headquarters earlier this year, open source software is an important part of Facebook’s infrastructure and development culture. The company contributes to a number of major projects such as Hadoop and memcached. It has also released some key pieces of its internal software stack, such as the Cassandra database server and Thrift RPC framework.

When Facebook wants to open a piece of software that has developed internally, the company must first isolate the component so that it can be used by third parties without depending on other proprietary Facebook code. The challenge of disentangling pieces of infrastructure for standalone consumption is an obstacle that hinders Facebook’s efforts to open more of its stack.

Releasing the company’s internal C++ libraries will make it easier to share additional software that depends on this code. Although the desire to get some critical Facebook dependencies out in the open is the primary motivation, the Folly code itself is also likely going to be useful for a number of C++ developers.