What is Open Source and What Does It Mean to Mediafly?

Improving the speed and quality of research via shared algorithm implementations by opensource.com | CC BY 2.0

Open source software (OSS) plays a major role for the biggest names in tech and Silicon Valley. Even proprietary giant Microsoft is embracing OSS, with CEO Satya Nadella saying “Microsoft loves Linux” (though don’t expect Microsoft Office to be freely available any time soon). Here at Mediafly, we love OSS too, and we wanted to take an opportunity to discuss how we implement open source, why it’s important to us and how we see OSS developing at Mediafly in the future.

But first, let’s take a step back for the uninitiated. What is open source software? OSS’s source code is openly available to users, which means that users can use it, modify it and distribute it, with the support of the community who maintains and uses the source code. Unlike closed-source or proprietary software, it doesn’t require expensive licenses (whose costs trickle down to the user), it’s easily auditable and it can be less resource-intensive, not requiring the constant software and hardware updates of proprietary software.

How we use OSS

Open source software wasn’t always as widely implemented at Mediafly as it is today. In fact, we started as a full Microsoft .NET stack shop, a very proprietary solution. In 2008, we began to transition to Infrastructure-as-a-service (specifically, Amazon Web Services), which allowed us to stop maintaining hardware, servers, storage and other physical infrastructure components. Shortly after, we began to migrate much of our backend to a combination of OSS, and over time have found a place for Python, Go, and server-side scripts.

We’ve been able to save a lot of money by using OSS instead of proprietary software where OSS does as well or better. The other reasons we use OSS are the same ones that are causing more and more companies to embrace open source software: ability to innovate, open technology and lack of supplier dependence. In fact, less than 3% of companies shun OSS and 78% of companies are completely run on it. Some notable examples of how Mediafly has used OSS include using Linux instead of Windows for server operating systems and PostgreSQL vs SQL for our databases. We use OSS at every level of our tech stack, and in the spirit of open source, here is a list of technologies in use today:

Infrastructure and backend

• Docker
• Salt
• Ngnix
• Mono
• HAProxy
• PostgreSQL
• RethinkDB
• Weave
• etcd
• ELMAH
• SOLR
• Ubuntu Linux
• RedHat Linux
• Python
• Go
• FFMPEG

Front End (Web)

• AngularJS
• Gulp
• Babel
• Twitter Bootstrap
• UI Router
• UI Bootstrap
• Modernizr
• jQuery
• OSMF (Open Source Media Framework)
• PDF.js

Front End (Mobile devices)

• nw.js / io.js / Chromium
• Android
• SQLite
• SQLCipher

Testing

• Jasmine
• Karma
• Appium
• Selenium / Protractor
• Mocha + Chai

Other

• Netflix ICE
• Netflix Security Monkey

All this software combined helps our solutions to continue delivering any content to any device without sacrificing security or user experience in the process. Beyond our direct product, our Customer Success and Product/Engineering teams use commercial OSS for our Helpdesk system. And, the website that you’re on right now (along with 1/5 of all websites) is built on WordPress, another piece of OSS.

Without contributions from the community, OSS isn’t able to quash bugs, test beta releases or stay on the cutting edge. That’s why in addition to using OSS, our team members are contributors, and in some cases maintainers, of OSS repositories. In the OSS community, contributors submit code that’s approved by maintainers; maintainers are ultimately responsible for the direction and quality of a particular project. Specifically, team members contribute to Apache Lucene.NET, Fatarrow and the ELMAH PostgreSQL driver. We’ve also contributed patches and pull requests to OSS that we use including Docker, Salt, Rethink DB .NET client drivers and Netflix ICE.

Open Source Looking Ahead

This isn’t all to say that OSS is always the best choice. There are some things for which OSS doesn’t offer a viable solution (or offers a solution of inferior quality). For that reason, we continue to license/partner for software including Tableau for business analytics and Technicolor Content Armor for forensic watermarking. We also subscribe to a number of Software-as-a-Service solutions to help power our development and operational process.

As innovators in our field, we’re always searching for ways to improve the customer experience, make our engineers’ lives easier, and hopefully lower costs along the way. Though we haven’t folded them into our solutions as of yet, here are some of the solutions that we’re closely and eagerly watching: Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, CoreOS, Vault, and AngularJS 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and 2.0.

If you’re interested in either getting involved with the open source community or finding new tools for your company, I recommend following trending projects on Github. Even if you’re not a technical wiz, there are a number of ways to contribute to the open source software that you’re using including sending bug reports or writing a blog post about the project.

Is there a piece of software you’d like to share that we might not have heard of? Leave us a note below with your favorites.

Jason Shah
CTO
Jason Shah, a “Flyer” since 2010, is responsible for cutting-edge product development and engineering for the enterprise software company. His duties include overseeing all elements of product development, platform and integration engineering, platform security, customer delivery, and product marketing.