Since software can’t run without infrastructure, global open-source projects need a special kind of infrastructure to operate.

Equinix Inc. is partnering with other players, such as The Linux Foundation, to offer open-source developers relevant infrastructure, such as bare metal, for unparalleled performance, scalability and manageability over their environments, according to Josh Atwell (pictured, left), senior director of developer relations at Equinix.

“Software is really boring if it doesn’t have something to run on,” Atwell said. “Being at Equinix has been pretty fantastic, because it’s our core — what we do is infrastructure. We’ve had a few partners that just come by to talk to our joint customers about how they’ve been using our platform, using our network, our bare metal servers to be able to solve problems, and it’s just nice remembering that the infrastructure’s still there and it’s important.”

Atwell and Robert Reeves (right), vice president of strategic partnerships at The Linux Foundation, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Savannah Peterson and Dustin Kirkland at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed why infrastructure plays a pivotal role in open source, and how Equinix, The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation fit into the picture. (* Disclosure below.)

Partnership supports open-source projects

Given that the open-source development model continues to tick based on the innovation it provides and the value it gives end users, Equinix, The Linux Foundation and CNCF have teamed up to provide the relevant tools and services, according to Reeves. As a result, better software is achieved by enabling different players to live their best open-source lives.

“We’re building cloud-native technology, and it needs to run somewhere,” he pointed out. “Equinix has been very generous in providing credits to CNCF projects so they can do what they do. The way Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Compute Foundation work is that we are the janitors of open source. We do the things that are really not that interesting, that are a little messy.”

Since there are more ways to contribute to open source other than just lines of code, more players should be encouraged to jump on this bandwagon, since this will be instrumental in taking the ecosystem to greater heights. This is because open source is a unifying factor irrespective of various factors, such as political differences, according to Reeves.

“We have to have everybody helping out,” he said. “When we distribute that load, that responsibility, now not everybody’s going to write code, but we can have people writing documentation, using the software, submitting bugs. We all help in our own different ways. We all have a corpus. The only way we scale is that if each of us figures out what that value is and shares it with everyone … I could say open source won, but in reality, we’re all winning.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA:

(* Disclosure: Equinix Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Equinix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE