Introducing the {code} Catalyst Community Program: Latest from {code} by Dell EMC

Today, {code} by Dell EMC, the open source arm of the organization, kicks off a new program designed to foster collaboration and contributions to the open source community. The new program is called {code} Catalyst and promotes open source movers and shakers, opens dialogue across company borders and creates an ecosystem of open source advocates who lead and advance emerging technology to support software-based infrastructures. {code} Catalyst members are also focused on raising awareness for open source projects within both startups and enterprise IT organizations.

“The number one thing for me when looking at a community to engage with is a passion for sharing and intellectual curiosity.” –Mike Coleman, Technology Evangelist, Docker Inc., {code} Catalyst

The {code} Catalyst program will bring members into the {code} fold, treating them as fully-fledged team members. Topics covered in the program’s regularly scheduled webinars and workshops will include open source use and adoption at large enterprises, automation and orchestration, CI/CD innovations, monitoring and metrics, storage and container data persistence, and of course deep-dives into important open source and {code} projects. By broadening the {code} community and bringing top talent together, Dell EMC is integrating and incubating a focused open source community.

To date, {code} has shepherded and/or published more than 65 open source projects – including REX-Ray, libStorage and RackHD to support large scale modern data center environments – and contributes to dozens more, including container projects such as Docker, Mesos and Kubernetes. Dell EMC also has partnerships with open source-focused companies such as Cloud 66, Docker, Mesosphere and Rancher. Working with the open source community worldwide, {code} is contributing to key projects that are changing the face of technology around the globe.

With more than 720 code commits from 14 contributors and 51 releases in the past 20 months, REX-Ray continues to be the trusted choice of organizations ranging from startups to enterprises when it comes to container data persistence.  A recent community contribution from Acquia, a leading CMS platform provider, included REX-Ray support of Amazon Elastic File System (AWS EFS) volumes in addition to Elastic Block Store (AWS EBS). Additional community contributions such as the proposed Digital Ocean driver from Digital Ocean are being considered in future releases.

The {code} team also listens to the community and is able to respond. From the beginning, REX-Ray has been immensely popular for its relevance to the container ecosystem. This has been driven by innovative software storage platforms such as ScaleIO and popular cloud platforms such as AWS. Most recently the community asked for Ceph support. Embracing and being a single place the community can turn to has been a hallmark of the REX-Ray project and for this we are eager to introduce support for Ceph in 0.7. Aggregation of these platforms into a simple storage orchestration tool like REX-Ray solves real challenges involved in software driven infrastructures by delivering choice, freedom, and flexibility.

We’re pumped for {code} Catalyst program, and already have some of the best minds in open source on board. Head over to the {code} Community and the {code} blog for more info on the program, on {code} and, most importantly, how to get involved!

See REX-Ray in action with Dell EMC ScaleIO and Postgres all running inside of Docker

Finally, for the latest from {code}, follow us on Twitter: @codeDellEMC.

About the Author: Josh Bernstein

Josh is an open source advocate and lifelong technologist. As the VP of Technology for Dell, he’s at the helm of {code}, the open source arm of the organization focused on advancing emerging technologies to support software-based infrastructures. Prior to Dell, Josh ran the Siri Deployment and Infrastructure Architecture team at Apple and took Siri from launch to tens of thousands of servers, deployed in more than a dozen locations worldwide, in under 5 years.