Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Navigating in uncertain times: de-risk your IT strategies with Open Source

By Emile Vauge, founder and CEO of Traefik Labs

In 2022, the global economy was hit hard - dealing with the aftermath of the pandemic and its impact on the economy on one hand, and the ongoing war and energy crisis on the other. Initially, some were hopeful enough that the tech industry won't have to deal with the dire consequences of the economic situation, at least not to the full extent.

Sadly, this was not the case. The effects of the recession were felt by the tech industry just as hard. We saw companies of all sizes and market shares reduce their workforces and budgets drastically in order to survive the storm, with thousands being laid off within just a couple of months.

But the need for highly available services worldwide and across all industries hasn't gone away. Companies of all sizes are required to do more with less and IT needs to keep servicing those businesses with the same quality standards as before. With these contemporary economic conditions, how can companies continue to deliver, scale while optimizing spend and de-risk their IT strategies?

To that, I would argue that now is not the time for betting on big changes and investments with hopes of payoffs, but to go back to the fundamentals, optimize processes, and give your IT teams quick time-to-value and cost-effective solutions that will enable them to deliver and scale. No time for bets based on fancy slides - time for proven, community-based, and open source-based solutions.

So, my prediction is that open source will be bigger in 2023 than ever before.

Here are a few steps to take that will help you minimize waste and costs related to tooling, quickly enable your team, and maximize time-to-value.

• Survey your tech stack: Over the years, multiple solutions might have been chosen to address similar needs and tech debt piled up.
• Plan ahead: Consider the long-term consequences and think about whether the short-term benefits outweigh the potential long-term costs.
• Standardize technologies: Where possible, standardize on a single technology or provider for a particular task or function. This can help to reduce the number of providers you work with and simplify maintenance and updates.
• Look for open source solutions: Search for solutions with numerous downloads and deployments, as well as active online communities where users can ask questions and receive help.

Factor in open source

During a financially precarious era, like the one we are facing now, making open source and open core tooling part of your stack and core development strategy can be life-saving. Open source and Open Core are low-risk bets with high rewards.

• High adoption provides your team with more training material, less costs to ramp up
• Projects with wide communities evolve and adapt faster
• You can start small and quickly with community versions and later migrate to a commercially-supported solution
• Longer-term community support
• Share maintenance costs
• Drastically simplify recruiting and reduce costs at onboarding
  

Moving into 2023, investing in an open source tech stack can very well be the deciding factor for your survival and the next steps for your IT teams. At Traefik Labs, we don't simply invest in open source - we've made open source the core part of our identity since day one. Tools like Traefik Proxy, an open source reverse proxy, load balancer, and API Gateway, can be a great asset in any cloud native stack. Traefik Proxy was designed to be as simple as possible to operate, but capable of handling large, highly-complex deployments. If you are looking to simplify networking complexity while designing, deploying, and operating applications, your IT teams can get a lot out of this production-ready, open source reverse proxy.

It is the abundance of simple, production-ready tools like this one that makes open source tooling an invaluable asset when building a cost-effective, quick time-to-value tech stack. Investing in open source in 2023 will not only help you get through these difficult times, but you will continue to reap the rewards for years to come.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emile Vauge is the founder and CEO of Traefik Labs, the leading cloud native networking company delivering technology that is used by the world's largest online enterprises including eBay, Condé Nast, and NASA. Emile is also the creator of Traefik, one of Docker Hub's top 10 projects with more than 2 billion downloads. Prior to Traefik Labs, Emile spent more than 10 years building applications for web-scale and large enterprise organizations where his first-hand experience with cloud native networking challenges inspired him to create Traefik.