DevTools Brew #2: Making Money from Open Source, Inside Uber’s move to the Cloud, React.js Documentary...

Mar 18, 2023

Hi there, it’s Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery, and this is DevTools Brew newsletter, where I provide you with a weekly roundup of the latest trends and insights in the infrastructure and devtools industry.

To receive it in your inbox each week, subscribe here!

Welcome to the DevTools Brew #2!

In this edition, we will explore:

💸 The Latest Funding Rounds in the Devtools & Infrastructure industry
📈 Making Money from Open Source
🚕 Inside Uber’s move to the Cloud
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
📹 React.js: The Documentary
🧵 Thread of the Week
⚡ Quick Link

I hope you enjoy this sneak peek, and look forward to sharing more insights with you soon.

Let's dive in!

💸 Latest Funding Rounds

Zenhub, a project management service for developers deeply integrated with GitHub, raised $10M Series A.
Cast AI, raised $20M led by Creandum to help companies reduce cloud spend.
Zed, a code editor focused on “multiplayer” experiences, closed a $10 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures.
Parallel, a load test platform focused on developer experience, raised a $2.3M Pre-Seed round.
Mitiga, a Cloud security vendor Mitiga lands $45M, valuing the company at over $100M.

💰 Other Notable News:

Grafana, the open-source observability platform, announced that it had acquired Pyroscope and merged it with its Phlare continuous profiling database.
Stripe is now valued at $50B following a $6.5B raise.

📈 Making Money from Open Source

“Software is Eating the World, and Open Source is Eating Software.”

Open Source seems to be the future of software because crowd development keeps pace better with innovation, secures growing cyber infrastructure better, and has a lower cost. But transitioning from a successful open-source project to a revenue-generating, scalable company is very challenging. Cowboy Ventures shared tips and insights on:

How open-source founders can assess whether their project-market fit can turn into product-market fit.
How some companies have used open source to build highly revenue-generating ventures.

Here are the key takeaways:

For an open source company, product-market fit is the degree to which the paid products tied to an open source project satisfy a need for a group of paid users.
The revenue you’ll need to generate with your paid product over time has to be big - hundreds of millions of dollars big.
High-quality users, influential users, a large addressable market, regular, sticky usage, and momentum are early signs of product potential.
High-quality users are users with access to budget with high potential to pay over time.
Influential users are users who influence new tool adoption.
A large addressable market refers to a billion-dollar+ spend potential in the category the project is in.
Regular, sticky usage means that the project is integrated into day-to-day user workflows, with automated regular usage.
Momentum is demonstrated by high GitHub engagement metrics, regular Slack or Discord channel engagement, and/or user-generated content reviewing the project.
The Security Analytics market, the Observability market, and the AI Operations market are additional markets where high revenue potential is seen.
Many popular open source projects run in production environments including open database system Vitess, open search Elasticsearch, and infrastructure-as-code project Terraform.

If you're an open-source founder looking to monetize your project, this article is a must-read!

🚕 Inside Uber’s move to the Cloud

Uber has been one of the few Big Tech companies operating its data centers, resisting the temptation to shift most of its compute and data storage capacity to the Cloud, for many years. But something changed this year: in February, Uber signed 7-year agreements with Google Cloud and Oracle, starting their move to the Cloud.

So, what happened and why? Gergely Orosz has talked with infrastructure engineers at Uber to get a clear picture of the context that led to this and what to expect in a two-part mini-series.

Here are the key takeaways from Part 1:

Uber operated its own data centers for the past nine years before deciding to move to the cloud.
One of the biggest challenges Uber faced in operating its own data centers was related to hardware issues, particularly with hard drives.
Uber's data center automation for maintaining hardware was not as advanced as some cloud providers, which made hardware maintenance expensive and time-consuming.
The Covid-19 pandemic led to a significant decline in Uber's ride-sharing business, resulting in underutilized data centers and excess capacity that still needed to be maintained.
Relying on the cloud impacts less on cash flow and the bottom line than capital expenditures (CapEx) associated with building and maintaining data centers.
Long-term contracts with cloud providers involve reserving capacity for a period of years, which creates difficulties in returning capacity.
Running on a single zone can lower infrastructure costs, but it carries the risk of outages.
Public cloud providers tend to have more resources to invest in physical security, infrastructure, and sustainability than in-house data centers.
The definition of terms can differ between cloud providers, and it is important to understand the specific meanings for each provider.

Part 2 (final part) is exclusive to paying subscribers and covers the following:

The groundwork of moving to the Cloud. Uber’s hybrid Cloud approach and why Crane – a 5-year project to support Cloud migrations – was key.
Is the Cloud necessarily cheaper? Spoiler: “it depends.”
IaaS, Paas, and SaaS. And why these differences matter when talking about “the Cloud.”
What does Uber moving to the Cloud mean? No: Uber won’t be fully on the Cloud. A nuanced look at what this may mean for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services.
Things can go wrong when operating your data centers. Power outages, flapping NICs, wildfires, and more.
Learnings about running your data centers. Engineers who built Uber’s data centers share useful learnings relevant beyond Uber.

I recommend visiting The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter by Gergely Orosz to read this amazing and in-depth story.

⭐ Star History Weekly Pick

The Star History Weekly Pick is:

Refine.dev, “Build your React-based CRUD applications without constraints”.
- ⭐️ 8.5K stars reached
- Github: https://github.com/refinedev/refine
- Source: https://star-history.com/#refinedev/refine&Date

📹 React.js: The Documentary

React is easily one of the single most popular libraries in use today. Given that it was made within a juggernaut like Facebook, you might have assumed it was always destined for success.

What if we told you that React’s first brush with the public sphere was anything but glamorous?
React.js: The Documentary brings you the full story behind the early days of React, focusing on the dedicated group of developers who helped bring it to the world stage. This story is told by an all-star cast of developers like Tom Occhino, Christopher Chedeau, Pete Hunt, Sebastian Markbåge, Dan Abramov, and many more.