Your business depends on software. Not only do your employees require the necessary platforms and applications with which to be productive throughout the day, but your company must also have the necessary backend software to power your supply chain. Without those tools, you can’t reliably fulfill orders, track packages, manage customer relationships or employees, deploy services, or do something as simple as having a website.
If your company happens to be of the enterprise sort (large corporations that manage hundreds or even thousands of employees), more than likely your development chain is not only complicated, it can get incredibly costly as well. You can, of course, drastically reduce that cost by opting to go the open-source route. In many cases, you won’t have a choice but opt for open-source software.
The Transition to Open Software is Imminent
Why? Because open source drives the enterprise backend. According to the State of Enterprise Open Source (a 2019 survey compiled by Red Hat), 69% of respondents said that open source was extremely important and only 1% didn’t use open-source software at all. Those are very telling numbers. In fact, it’s fairly easy to surmise that your company is either already using open source, or will be in the near future.
When that time comes, if you don’t have the in-house skills to employ open-source technology, you might have to turn to the likes of Latin American software outsourcing to get it done. Should that happen, you might be wondering how such an entity could help you add open-source into your development chain.
Let’s find out.
#1 What is Open Source?
Before we discuss how open source can be implemented into your development chain, you might need a quick lesson on what open source is. The concept is actually quite simple: open source software that is released under a license that allows the user to download the code for an application, alter the code, and redistribute the code with their changes included.
According to OpenSource.com, “open source licenses grant computer users permission to use open source software for any purpose they wish. Some open source licenses—what some people call “copyleft” licenses—stipulate that anyone who releases a modified open source program must also release the source code for that program alongside it.”
Curious about some examples of open-source software being used in enterprise businesses? Here’s a short list of popular titles:
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- NGINX
- MySQL
- WordPress
- Git
- Woocommerce
- Bugzilla
- OpenProject
- Node.JS
- Eclipse
- Bootstrap
Without some of the above, enterprise businesses would struggle to innovate and compete. In fact, technologies like the cloud and blockchain would never have come into being without open source.
With that understanding, let’s find out how software outsourcing in Latin America can help your company.
#2 Necessary talent
Your business might have a solid collection of developers and admins. But does that in-house talent pool have enough experience with open-source software to make it part of your development chain? It’s one thing to be able to deploy, say, a website with NGINX, but to integrate it with your current tools and make it scale takes special skills.
Do your current in-house developers know Java, JavaScript, Ruby, or Go? If not, your business might struggle to get open source integrated into your development chain.
If you find your current crop of developers lacking such skills, you could easily ramp up that talent pool with an outsourced team to enhance your development staff such that it includes the necessary talent.
#3 Integrating with APIs
Those same developers will need to be able to integrate any software they build (or retool, in the case of open source) with existing APIs or those you generate in-house. API integration is an incredibly important link of the development chain. Without the ability to use various APIs, you’re not going to be able to seamlessly join different software tools with one another.
For example: say you’ve built a powerful eCommerce platform and you want to allow users to be able to log into your site with third-party accounts (such as Facebook or Google). For this, you would have to be able to integrate your site with the Google Sign-in or Facebook Login API. Most likely, you’ll need to integrate those hooks and APIs into various pieces of open-source software. Or, you might be building something in-house for this purpose. Chances are pretty high that what your team is developing will depend on open-source software.
When it comes time to integrate those APIs, will your team be up to the task?
#4 Containers, containers, containers
No matter where in the enterprise landscape you look, you will see (or read about) companies making the shift to containers. There’s a good reason for this: Containers are incredibly flexible and agile.
Retail, communication, IT services, staffing and recruiting, hospitals and healthcare, higher education, insurance, and financial services all make use of container technology. Fortune 100 companies like JPMorgan Chase, ThoughtWorks, Neudesic, and SLALOM all use container technology.
The vast majority of the technology that drives containers is open source. It’s also considerably challenging. You shouldn’t let that keep your company from adopting containers, as with them you can create an incredibly agile and automated development pipeline.
#5 Stacks of stacks
A stack is a collection of software that integrates together to make a cohesive whole. One of the most well-known (and used) stacks is the LAMP stack. That’s:
- Linux
- Apache
- MySQL
- PHP
The LAMP stack is used everywhere. And although it’s really easy to install a LAMP stack (for example, on Ubuntu, that stack can be installed with the command sudo apt-get install lamp-server^), developing your company’s web presence with that stack isn’t quite as cut and dry. For that, you might need to employ the help of Latin American software outsourcing.
And the LAMP stack isn’t the only stack on the block. There are web development stacks like:
- MEAN (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS)
- Meteor
- Django
- Ruby on Rails
There are even company-specific stacks, such as:
- Airbnb Tech Stack (JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, Amazon RDS, Hadoop, NGINX)
- Facebook Tech Stack (PHP, GraphQL, Hack, Tornado, Cassandra, RocksDB, Beringei, Memcached)
- Pinterest TechStack (Python, Java, Go, Django, Javascript MVC, MySQL, Hadoop, HBase, Memcached, Redis, NGINX)
- Uber Tech Stack (Python, Java, Go, Objective-C, Node.js, Apache Thrift, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, NGINX)
Is your current dev team able to work with these stacks? If not, you might want to consider bringing in an outsourced team.
Integrating Open Source Into Your Development Chain
Is it necessary for you to integrate open source into your development chain? No. Will it help your business grow in ways you probably never considered? Quite possibly. If you’re looking to not just create a more reliable company platform, but expand your offerings and compete and climb ahead of your competition, open source is the way to go.
However, going down that road isn’t easy. Thus, you might consider the help of BairesDev, a reputable Latin American software development company that can offer you the top 1% of tech talent, high-quality results, and the assessment you need for your open-source project to succeed.
