Summary Bullets:
• Developers naturally flock to familiar forums to collaborate and learn about new technologies
• Early open-source software (OSS) projects leading the industry include OpenLLaMA, PyTorch, Nvidia Triton, and Ray/KubeRay

Never before have enterprise developers needed more access to emerging and unfamiliar technologies then during this era of app modernization and generative AI (GenAI). The sea change that GenAI has imposed on the industry has prompted a resurgence in the importance of having OSS alternatives available to developers.

The shift into new application architectures including microservices is driving developers towards OSS projects that allow them to look under the hood and try out new technologies in order to gain a greater understanding of how things work. Through OSS, they are able to modify code, gain better control over their apps, and generally exploit more flexibility in the software so they can customize apps to their specific needs.

OSS forums and developer hubs–think GitHub and Stack Overflow–provide an important role in this process by supporting environments of community and collaboration–places to explore new approaches by peers, new concepts, new ways of modernizing traditional IT processes, workflows, and apps. Professionals and non-coders alike are free to ask questions, share experiences, and contribute to projects (in addition to GitHub’s services in code hosting and version control). Open source is quite often a starting point for non-coders and sysadmins looking to expand their professional knowledge base and even seek out new job opportunities through upskilling or reskilling.

There is a broad ecosystem of players contributing to open-source projects. Notable foundations include Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and Apache Software Foundation, among others. GlobalData will be attending CNCF’s high-profile KubeCon conference in Paris next week, a biannual event that attracts a brain trust of experts who help shed light on future trends.

The industry is now witnessing an intersection between OSS and GenAI, because GenAI provides intuitive hooks into cloud native applications (such as those built on Kubernetes) making the merging of the two approaches inevitable. The trend represents the best of both worlds: the collaboration, access, and innovation of OSS, and GenAI’s automated code and workload creation. And while there is still no clear reference architecture available to enterprise developers for GenAI, the advanced AI technology is bringing new life to innovations and will help organizations optimize DevOps initiatives.

GlobalData recognizes some key high-profile OSS technologies and projects that are on track to play an important role among enterprise developers:

• LLMs (Generative models): OpenLLaMA, OpenAI GPT-J

• Deep learning frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX
• Deployment Platforms: Nvidia Triton, MLflow
• Datasets: Apache Arrow, Hugging Face Hub
• Developer tools: Hugging Face, Open Assistant, GPT Engineer
• DevOps tools: Ray/KubeRay
• Security/governance: Kyverno, Gatekeeper

For more details into these technologies, please see Generative AI Watch: GenAI’s Advent Highlights the Growing Importance of OSS