The 10 Hottest New Open-Source Technologies And Tools of 2019

These 10 open source projects changed the game by solving real-world enterprise problems in a cost-effective and scalable manner.

An Era Of Open Innovation

The open source movement is a leading driver of technological innovation in the cloud era, delivering a seemingly endless chain of new projects that help organizations adopt cloud-native application architectures and methods.

The magic of open source is that its methodology enables and encourages industry giants, solo developers and innovative startups to all cooperate in pursuit of a common technological vision to the benefit of a vast user base.

Through open projects, those entities find common ground, leading to them complementing each other's work to build and promote code that solves real-world enterprise problems in a cost-effective and scalable manner.

Here are 10 open source projects that changed the game in 2019.

Get more of CRN's 2019 tech year in review.

Airship

This telecom-led initiative to develop an open technology for automating and provisioning cloud infrastructure in a 5G world has potential to support new use cases that emerge at the edge of the network.

AT&T launched Airship in 2018 alongside SK Telecom, Intel and the OpenStack Foundation. Those companies got a boost when Dell recently threw its weight behind the project.

The value of Airship will be tested as next-generation technologies, specifically 5G networks, demand distributed architectures that use disaggregated and open infrastructure to provision mobile services—capabilities hardware won't be able to deliver.

AWS Cloud Development Kit

At the AWS New York Summit in July, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels introduced the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK).

The open source software development framework aims to boost developer productivity by modeling and provisioning cloud application resources using familiar programming languages.

Vogels said enabling the AWS ecosystem to write high-level constructs in a familiar environment presents an "ideal destination of infrastructure as code."

The open source SDK supports four programming languages: TypeScript, Python, .NET and Java.

Containerd

Containerd, a project shepherded by the Open Container Initiative, looks to establish an industry standard runtime for containers.

The work spun out of Docker in an attempt by the container pioneer to break up its platform into a more modular architecture constituted of loosely coupled components.

Containerd can be used with Docker, Kubernetes or other container orchestration platforms to abstract away calls to the operating system kernel and reduce OS-specific functionality, delivering a simpler, more-robust and portable application deployment.

EdgeX Foundry

Dell Technologies spearheaded this project, now hosted by The Linux Foundation, to develop a vendor-neutral, open-source platform to support edge computing.

As the Internet of Things matures, EdgeX Foundry could solve common challenges to deploying industrial devices in the field that produce vast amounts of data in need of compute, analysis, storage and aggregation.

The project offers a framework structured across multiple layers, each composed of multiple microservices. That modular architecture eases scaling, updating and distribution across systems.

InfluxDB 2.0

With the latest major release of InfluxDB, open source developer InfluxData collapsed its stack into a cohesive platform combining time series database, a UI and dashboarding tool, and a background processing and monitoring agent.

The platform is a powerful solution for developers trying to solve time series data challenges. The 2.0 release introduced Flux, a new data scripting and query language.

Jaeger

Jaeger has emerged as a standard technology for tracing application logs across microservices, an increasingly vital capability in an age of microservices.

The project is the seventh to graduate from the groundbreaking Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Networking and debugging containerized services presents a much larger problem than doing the same for monolithic applications. As developers build their apps on distributed infrastructure, Jaeger has become a popular tool to ease distributed transaction monitoring, performance and latency optimization, root cause analysis, and service dependency analysis.

Knative

Knative is delivering an open source serverless framework for event-driven applications, freeing developers to focus on writing code while ignoring the complexities of serverless infrastructure.

The project was spawned at Google and found support from more than 50 companies looking to deliver a developer-friendly solution for building, serving and running serverless applications on Kubernetes.

Knative includes scale-to-zero, autoscaling, in-cluster builds and eventing frameworks for developing cloud-native applications on Kubernetes.

Open Enclave SDK

Microsoft started work on this project, then published the code to GitHub under an open source license.

The Open Enclave SDK implements a unified enclave abstraction that helps developers leverage trusted execution environments to better safeguard code and data. The open source development kit delivers a pluggable, common way to create redistributable applications that secure data in use.

Open Enclave, which supports Linux and Windows hosts, looks to make it easy to write and debug code in trusted execution environments, as well as migrate applications between them.

Prometheus

Prometheus, the second project to graduate from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation after Kubernetes, is becoming a go-to tool for monitoring and instrumenting containers and the applications they enable to be built with microservices architectures.

The event monitoring and alerting software records real-time metrics in a time series database built using a HTTP pull model, with flexible queries and real-time alerting.

Weave Ignite

Weaveworks, a London-based container startup, has built on the Ignite distributed database and Firecracker microVM platform to advance its vision for GitOps-style management of Kubernetes clusters.

Weave Ignite offers an open source virtual machine with a container UX and built-in GitOps management.

The project takes advantage of the lightweight Firecracker virtual machines developed by AWS to optimize security, isolation, speed and resource consumption.

With GitOps methodology, where a Git serves as a single source of truth for describing infrastructure, Weave Ignite can manage VMs declaratively and automatically.