Confluent CEO Jay Kreps says"open-source-as-a-service" is software-building trend that's here to stay.f Jay Kreps were to start his $4.5 billion-valued tech company Confluent over again, he’d take a shortcut, he says: rather than spend five years building the open source software underpinning Confluent’s success, he’d just buy it instead.
Speaking of the open-source tool he and cofounders Neha Narkhede and Jun Rao built at LInkedIn, Apache Kafka, Kreps says the data software is more important for the community that formed around it than it is irreplaceable code. “It’s not how Kafka was written, it’s how it was adopted,” says Kreps. “You could get the exact same thing from a number of different companies [today].”
What that means, according to Confluent’s CEO: tech entrepreneurs can move faster today by grabbing off-the-shelf options and avoiding having to spend limited resources on technical staff trained in those tools. “If you’re first step in adopting this new capability is hiring a bunch of the highest paid people, it’s an expensive first step,” Kreps says. “That’s why the rise of these services is a big deal.
What gives Kreps the confidence to weigh in on the state of open-source company-building beyond Confluent’s valuation: he, Narkhede and Rao spent years working on infrastructure at LinkedIn, solving their own problems with “event streaming,” in which engineers
jasonbelldata DavidJeans2 Wait. So there's companies who will pay other companies to tell them 'just use saas'? Isn't their CTO supposed to know that already?
DavidJeans2 ¹