"One important part of open source is perhaps not only the code itself but also sharing information and what kind of business problems it helps to solve"
Heikki Nousiainen
Field CTO, Aiven
Open source
Aiven and the open source community
At Aiven, open source is at the core of everything we do – from our culture of open-mindedness, to our desire to contribute and keep giving back to the world.
Vision and mission
Open source from the heart
Aiven is founded – and grounded – in open source. While we make open source technology easy to implement, we want to be much more than just a consumer of open source code and a provider of open source services.
We give back to the open source community by actively contributing to all areas that touch the professional lives of open source creators and maintainers. We also foster the community by keeping open source truly open, ensuring the best open source data technology always remains available to everyone.
At Aiven, we wear our open source hearts on our sleeves.
Giving back
Building open source security and sustainability
We want to ensure the future of open source software – the bedrock that global data infrastructure is built upon.
We make sure that critical code and software is actively and sustainably maintained. This applies to both the actual OSS projects that Aiven directly uses and contributes to and to the entire OSS ecosystem.
Community first
We aim to help make open source projects better – and not just for us. Openness benefits everyone.
Contributing equally
We’re constructive contributors and celebrate the diversity and independence of the open source community.
Transparent freedom
We have no hidden agendas, and ensure projects don’t depend on one organization or individual for their survival.
Sharing is caring
As well as relieving the burden on maintainers, we also work on documentation, reviews and knowledge sharing.
Aiven contributions
Open Source Projects
Aiven owns and maintains multiple open source projects – here are a few of our main repos and other projects we help maintain.
We welcome contributions to all our projects. You can find links to the GitHub repos in the project list below, or check out the rest of Aiven’s projects on GitHub.
Projects we own
PostgreSQL®
PGHoard
PGHoard is a python-based backup daemon and restore tooling for PostgreSQL. It uses cloud object stores to store the backup data. We use this tool in our own setup and it is also relied upon by others.
We also have a sister project to PGHoard called MyHoard which offers similar functionality for MySQL.
Contribute on GitHub
Projects we contribute to
Apache Kafka®
Apache Kafka® is a powerful open source event streaming tool for those needing to collect, process, store and analyze data.
Aiven’s OSPO team has developers dedicated to contributing to the Apache Kafka® community in different areas (mainly around Apache Kafka Connect), including a committer on the project.
PostgreSQL®
PostgreSQL® – an open source object-relational database system with over 35 years of active development – has a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance.
Aiven’s OSPO team has dedicated developers who are long time contributors to the PostgreSQL® community.
Apache Flink®
Apache Flink® is a framework and distributed processing engine for stateful computations over unbounded and bounded data streams.
Aiven’s OSPO team has developers dedicated to contributing to the Apache Flink® community in different areas, including a committer on the project.
OpenSearch®
OpenSearch® is a community-driven, Apache 2.0-licensed open source search and analytics suite forked from Elasticsearch. OpenSearch makes it easy to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze data.
Aiven’s OSPO team has dedicated developers who are long time contributors to the OpenSearch® community, including a committer on the project.
How we contribute
Open Source Program Office
At Aiven, we want to contribute back to the open source community. That’s why we created our Open Source Program Office (OSPO) – so we have a dedicated team to focus on this cause.
The Aiven OSPO makes sure that the projects we offer as managed services are well maintained. We not only take care of Aiven's OSS projects, we also keep a watchful eye on all open source projects that impact Aiven, actively collaborating with external contributors.
rolling up our sleeves
Open source contributor spotlight
As well as the Open Source Program office, our developers, engineers, solutions architects – even our founders – all pitch in to collaborate and contribute to open source projects around the world.
We asked a few of them to tell us why they think this is important.
Roman is a Software Engineer at Aiven with a strong open source background, in fact GitHub is where we recruited him from! He has made contributions to SaltStack and KDE, and is active with a programming language called Nim. Nim has a python-like syntax, compiles to static binaries, and has great performance BUT when Roman first used it, he found it was missing some key features such as symlink support.... so he added those while he was there.
Roman says "I try to benefit society in the best way I can, and since my main skill is coding, I use that to help others in my spare time".
Roman Inflianskas
Software Engineer, Aiven
rominf on GitHub
Thomas is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Aiven, based in Toronto. From a background in the academic field of computational logic he became a Debian package maintainer for software packages in that discipline including clasp and gringo.
About his attitude to open source Thomas says "As I need to accomplish some piece of work, I want to get the problem out of my way as quickly as possible, so a good bug report helps the maintainer of the OSS component to address the problem quickly and therefore I can enjoy the fixed software sooner ... More often than not, just fixing the bug in the OSS component is less work than creating a by-pass for the bug myself.", which is a good reflection of how we do things at Aiven.
Thomas Krennwallner
Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Aiven
tkren on GitHub
Josep has decades of experience in and around open source. At Aiven he manages the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) team.
Josep got deeply involved in open source almost by accident. He says: "My journey in open source started when one day I decided to fix a typo on an OSS project. I liked the process and the community so much that I kept fixing things and I became a maintainer."
In his GitHub life, Josep is a committer of Akka HTTP, a server and client side HTTP stack on top of akka-actor and akka-stream. Akka HTTP is a general toolkit for providing and consuming HTTP-based services that allows you to pick the API abstraction level to suit your application.
Josep Prat
Open Source Engineering Director, Aiven
Jlprat on GitHub
Supporting Aiven developers
Plankton Program
At Aiven, we want to support our employees in their endeavors, and also contribute to society as a whole. We have a scheme called the "Plankton Program" that allows employees to claim compensation for the (limited) time they spend on open source activities outside of work. Many of our employees make open source contributions at work, on our own projects or on the upstream projects or other industry tools - and those are all on work time of course.
The Plankton Program allows us to support and recognize the extra work and small improvements to the ecosystem that our employees are making outside of what is strictly required of them. We are proud of our people and happy to support their work!
