This talk will cover the work Facebook has done to become more involved with various upstream open source communities. We will start with why we believe it's important for companies to build strong relationships with the communities around the software they use - particularly in infrastructure. Next we will look at the steps we took to become better community citizens and finally we will discuss some case studies. Specifics covered will include various projects we've contributed to, technical work such as back-porting various OS components from Rawhide to CentOS 7, benefits we've received and lessons learned.

1. Building Better FLOSS
Community Relationships @ FB
DevConf.cz 2017
Phil Dibowitz & Davide Cavalca
Production Engineering: Operating Systems
Facebook

2. Disclaimer:
Lots of teams at Facebook work with
opensource and are awesome at it!

3. Who are you two and why do we care?

4. Agenda
● Open Source at Facebook
● Why do this?
● How do you do this?
● Our journey, via examples!
● Lessons Learned

5. Open Source @ Facebook
Open Source Team...
● Shepherds projects
● Builds tooling
● Provides guidance/input

6. Open Source @ Facebook
● Facebook started as a LAMP stack!
● HHVM
● MySQL
● Kernel

7. Open Source @ Facebook
● Hbase
– Forked early…
– Years later, opensource version:
● halved avg latency
● long tail latency reduced by > 90%
● single server failover times cut dramatically
●
Reduction in long GC pauses
– Now back to upstream – much work later
● Zookeeper
– Similar situation in progress
● Chef
– Have kept up with development and deployment
– Stayed entirely on open source release
– Great results for 4 years...

8. Open Source @ Facebook
We also develop our own open-source software in the
community...
● Presto
● OSQuery
● React
● RocksDB
● McRouter
● Buck
● Surround360 Processor

9. Why Build Relationships?

10. Why? It’s efficient!
● Maintain less internal code
– Less man-hours!
● Be able to contribute code
– Help community
– Share ownership
– Feel good
● More eyeballs (better code)
– More reviews
– More testing

11. Why? Less waste!
Keeping up with the community means…
● Less time wasted…
– Debugging solved problems
– Filing useless bugs
– Porting fixes around
● Less animosity

12. Why? Direction!
● Know what’s coming soon (... to a theater near
you)
– Be prepared
– Be part of that discussion
● Influence community direction (eventually)
– Start those discussions!

13. Why? People!
● Happier internal engineers
● More engaged community
● Better recruiting
● … good relationships are contagious!

14. How?
Build Social Capital

15. How? In Person (where possible)
● Conferences
● Meet-ups
● Their office
● Your office
● Wherever!

16. How? Participation
● Be on mailing lists / in SLACK / on IRC
… and join in the conversation!
● (again) Go to relevant conferences/meetups
● Understand high level project goals
● Understand work flows

17. How? All the context!
● Listen first to get their context
● Provide your context before large PRs
● Remember: find appropriate medium for the
length and type of conversation

18. How? Determine speed
● Following “latest”
● What’s right for project?
– Consider their release cadence, dependencies,
development velocity, etc?
● What’s right for the time?
– Consider your resources, deployment cadence, and
rate of contribution you expect to make

19. How? Finally
Be Honest

20. Our journey, by example

21. Common Considerations
● Goal
● Speed
● Size of change
● Previous engagements with the community

22. A good example: Chef
● We’d already built a relationship with Chef
● … but we had a business relationship too.
● Goal: (initially) scaling, (later) various features
● Speed: custom bleeding edge builds early on… now
quarterly
● Got involved in community events and discussion
● Benefits: IPv6, multipackage, scaling, systemd support
● Also: released various tooling and cookbooks

23. A place to start: Anaconda
● Goal: Single installer across versions, use newer code
● Flew out to meet
– Started with: how to be good community members
– Ended in hackathon
● Kept in touch in IRC
● Speed: built from master ~monthly
● Benefits: single installer, vastly newer hardware support,
solid IPv6 support, not working in abandoned codebase

24. Continuing the Journey: systemd
● CentOS 7
● Goal: newer features/code, cgroup2
● Speed: latest release
● Backported (rawhide to CentOS 7) – shared
● Conferences
● Benefits: cgroup2, mkosi, etc.

25. Other Examples
● initscripts/network-scripts
– IPv6 fixes & features
– Per-device routes
– Re-whitespace
● rpm/yum/dnf
– rpmdb scaling issues
– want to help test at scale

26. Lessons Learned
● Listen first & understand their context
● Provide your context
● Non-code contributions

27. Resources
●
Rawhide → CentOS 7 backports
– Github: https://github.com/facebookincubator/rpm-backports
– (RH) Copr: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/jsynacek/systemd-backports-for-centos-7/
●
Kernel blog post
– https://code.facebook.com/posts/938078729581886/improving-the-linux-kernel-with-upstream-contributions/
●
Systemd talk
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhYd0S3qiMY
● Chef Tooling:
– https://github.com/facebook/taste-tester
– https://github.com/facebook/grocery-delivery
– https://github.com/facebook/chef-cookbooks
●
MySQL: https://github.com/facebook/mysql-5.6/
● HHVM: http://hhvm.com/
●
Presto: https://prestodb.io/
●
RocksDB: http://rocksdb.org/

28. You’ve got questions?
We’ve got answers!
(maybe)