Put open source to work
July 16–17, 2018: Training & Tutorials
July 18–19, 2018: Conference
Portland, OR

Business Summit and Case Studies

Designed specifically for executives, business leaders, and strategists, the OSCON Business Summit provides concise, high-level case studies on the most promising and successful developments in open source for the enterprise. You’ll get an insider’s look at the open source implementations that will have the most profound impact on your business. Get advice on how to mitigate risk and out-innovate your competitors. You have critical—and urgent—decisions to make about your open source strategy. Get the insight you need at the OSCON Business Summit. The Business Summit is open to Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze passes only.

11:00am11:40am Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Non-technical
Average rating: ****.
(4.57, 7 ratings)
The National Security Agency (NSA) uses a lot of open source software, but it’s traditionally been a challenge for developers to navigate the processes, policy, and mechanics of contributing back to the community. Jacob DePriest explains how a group of open source evangelists are trying to strengthen the open source software ecosystem at the NSA and make it a normal part of developers’ jobs. Read more.
11:50am12:30pm Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Intermediate
Hui Ding (Facebook)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 3 ratings)
Hui Ding explains how open source software has helped lead to Instagram's success—particularly Django, the open source Python-based framework. Hui discusses Instagram's evolution from a mere follower falling behind the community to a leading contributor and shares perspectives on aligning Instagram's engineering team and working with the Python community. Read more.
1:45pm2:25pm Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Non-technical
Steffen Evers (Bosch Software Innovations GmbH)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)
Active participation in open source communities is still a fairly new approach for industrial manufacturers. However, recognizing the relevance of open source for its future business, Bosch has increased its open source activities significantly in the last years. Steffen Evers offers an overview of the major activities and reveals insights into Bosch’s motivation. Read more.
2:35pm3:15pm Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Advanced
Micheal Benedict (Pinterest)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 3 ratings)
Pinterest helps you discover and do what you love. Pinterest's infrastructure is built to cater to its scale—over 150M MAUs across the globe contributing and combing through a billion pins—which has very unique requirements. Micheal Benedict explains how Pinterest, a company operating on VMs in the public cloud since its inception, made a move to containers. Read more.
4:15pm4:55pm Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Intermediate
Joshua Shanks (Indeed)
Joshua Shanks discusses how Indeed increases its delivery velocity by using a service mesh for their communication features. With this approach, Indeed product teams no longer need to worry about service discovery, load balancing, or retries, and they get rate limiting and authentication for free. This has led to faster, happier teams. Read more.
5:05pm5:45pm Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Non-technical
Eddie Satterly (DataNexus)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 2 ratings)
Eddie Satterly explains how a very old legacy company transformed into a modern customer-driven powerhouse using tools and methodologies from open source. Eddie covers cost savings, changes in culture, and new capabilities derived from this key shift, as the company went from zero to open-sourcing two of its own internal projects in 18 months. Read more.
11:00am11:40am Thursday, July 19, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Beginner
Daniel Ruggeri (Mastercard)
Average rating: ****.
(4.40, 5 ratings)
I love open source. You love open source. But your company doesn't get why it's a Very Good Thing™ and won't let you participate. Daniel Ruggeri explains how some open source-loving engineers at Mastercard were able to create a program and change the tone about open source in the enterprise. Read more.
11:50am12:30pm Thursday, July 19, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Non-technical
Edward Cable (Mifos Initiative), James Dailey (Mifos Initiative)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 3 ratings)
Banks are now just starting to embrace open source. Ed Cable and James Dailey share case studies on banks and fintech startups from four different continents that built on top of the Apache Fineract core banking platform, accelerating their innovation, lowering their costs, and transforming them from consumers to contributors of open source. Read more.
1:45pm2:25pm Thursday, July 19, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Intermediate
Michael Downey (United Nations Foundation)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
Today’s global climate of international development funding cuts, along with growing challenges in sustainability of FOSS projects generally, calls for a renewed focus on co-investment in shared resources for those projects. Michael Downey explains how the DIAL Open Source Center is working toward this goal. Read more.
2:35pm3:15pm Thursday, July 19, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Non-technical
Molly de Blanc (Free Software Foundation)
Average rating: **...
(2.50, 2 ratings)
When Munich adopted a free and open source procurement policy, the GNU/Linux world soared. Several years later, after much success, the city council voted to abandon their efforts and return to a more proprietary system. Molly de Blanc talks about what happened in Munich and looks at other cities that have adopted free and open source procurement policies. Read more.
4:15pm4:55pm Thursday, July 19, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Intermediate
Andrew Kim (DigitalOcean)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
Andrew Kim leads a technical deep dive into how DigitalOcean uses anycast IPs, BGP, and Kubernetes to run globally distributed services on containers. Along the way, Andrew discusses design considerations for scalability, architectural trade-offs, data center networking, lessons learned in production, and challenges to adopting containers for latency sensitive applications. Read more.
5:05pm5:45pm Thursday, July 19, 2018
Location: D139/140
Level: Beginner
Greg Taylor (Reddit)
Average rating: ****.
(4.71, 7 ratings)
The last few years have been a period of tremendous growth for Reddit. Process, tooling, and culture have all had to adapt to an organization that has tripled in size and ambition. Greg Taylor discusses Reddit's evolution and explains how one of the world’s busiest sites develops, deploys, and operates services at significant scale. Read more.