Slides from my talk at SiliconIndia OSS conference in Bangalore Nov 2012. Talks about use of OSS as a competitive advantage, especially in areas like eCommerce citing Flipkart as an example.

1. OSS as a competitive advantage
Regunath B
regunathb@gmail.com
Twitter : @RegunathB
OSS projects:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mindtreeinsight/
https://github.com/regunathb/Trooper/

2. Why are we here today?
● Still wary of OSS, looking for success stories
● Use OSS, unsure how to leverage better
● OSS contributor
● Leverage OSS as a competitive advantage

3. Competitive Advantage
● Not easy to replicate
– User Experience → Engagement → Trust
– Maintain agility at scale
– Eco-system integration – partners, suppliers

4. Competitive Advantage (contd)
● How does OSS help?
– Ability to collect, process data at scale : Big Data
– Metrics, Monitoring, Alerts
– Automation
– And more...
– Ability to accommodate change in business process, newer
business models
– Faster procurement
– Shorter development

5. OSS use at Flipkart
● Custom built (on OSS)
systems that are
differentiators/provide
competitive advantage
● Technology selection by
teams, but within company
roadmap/guidelines (fosters
innovation)

6. OSS use at Flipkart
● Patterns
– Data Access
● Immutable Events, Not Mutable State
● Repair on Read, Eventual Consistency vs. Write
Consistency (Needed at times, not always)
– Highly Concurrent, Parallel execution designs
– Messaging – Scaling, Integration
– Task Frameworks – Map-Reduce, Actor-model, Event
driven

7. OSS use at Flipkart
● Leverage heavily / On the roadmap
– Data stores – SQL, NoSQL (High RW throughputs)
● CAP tradeoffs (AP vs. CP)
● K,V(Low-Latency) and AOS (Maximize Concurrency, Ensure
Consistency)
● LSM trees (Leverage Memory & Disk)
– Runtime containers – Web, Middleware, Services
– Lean transports
– Monitoring, Alerts
– Analytics, Self-serve reporting

8. Vendor neutrality
● Avoid lock-in with vendor, vendor solution features
● Evolve vendor eco-system : better quality, lower prices
– e.g. Bio-metric device suppliers in Aadhaar
● Ability to customize/build missing features
– Access to large talent pool
– Critical for new business domains like e-Commerce

9. Enhanced Security
● No hidden Trojans
– Critical for
sensitive
projects
(Aadhaar)

10. What's needed?
● Culture shift
– OSS is mature, secure and of enterprise quality
● Well articulated OSS use policy
– License compatibility, Distribution
● Contribute freely back to projects, Create new ones
– Fosters innovation, Motivation, Attract talent

11. FOSS (Flipkart OSS)
● Trooper (https://github.com/regunathb/Trooper)
– Runtime profiles for building Java apps, Useful libraries
● Projects under incubation / on private GitHub repos
– RESTBus : Async REST style integration middleware

12. Thank You
Regunath B
regunathb@gmail.com
Twitter : @RegunathB
OSS projects:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mindtreeinsight/
https://github.com/regunathb/Trooper/