lecture: Building a Software Appliance from Open and Closed Components

How Delphix combines an open source operating system with a closed source management application to create a self-contained software appliance

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In this talk, we discuss the challenges and mechanics of assembling a self-contained software appliance (from operating system to web application) from disparate open and closed source repositories, touching on issues of choosing open source components with appropriate licenses, managing a large number of different licenses during the build process, providing visibility into the licenses of the various components that form our stack, and keeping open and closed code separate. We also discuss the process of collaborating on an open source operating system with other contributors, both corporate and community.

Delphix abstracts DBMS data files and log files to provide virtual databases that allow for rapid snapshotting, cloning, and rollback. The Delphix product is a self-contained software appliance consisting of a proprietary virtual database management application built atop a derivative of the open source Illumos operating system (formerly called OpenSolaris), and engineers at Delphix regularly work on both proprietary application components as well as open source operating system components.

Alongside such corporations as DEY Storage Systems, Joyent, Nexenta, and OmniTI, Delphix plays a leading role in the development of Illumos by contributing a significant amount of code (Delphix contributes more code to ZFS than all other organizations combined), mentoring community contributors, and providing engineering and organizational resources (e.g., code reviews, build infrastructure, and QA). In this talk, we also discuss the mechanics of pushing and pulling changes to and from the broader Illumos and ZFS communities alongside the aforementioned corporations.