Using Open Source Tools at Your Company w/ Doron Gill of Logz.io

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Hey, you're listening to Dev Interrupted, the podcast made for engineering leaders who want to continuously improve. The open source community is the most pure expression of collaboration in engineering that exists today. But when is the right time to bring your project into the enterprise? Engineering leaders have to make these choices every day, which is why we brought in Doron Gill, the VP of engineering at logz.io, to answer our questions about open source security, implementation, and which companies an open source tool stack is perfect for.
Also be sure to join our upcoming Dev Interrupted watch party on May 20th. I'm bringing back some of our favorite guests from Netflix, GitHub and Honeycomb to discuss how they're creating continuous improvement at their organization. Sign up using the link below.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
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**SPEAKER_1** (1:11)
Doron, thanks for joining us today.

**Doron Gill** (1:14)
Hey, thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:16)
Yeah, yeah, awesome to have you on the pod. We're gonna dive in to some of the pros and cons of open source tooling. And I know, you know, a lot of people out there, a lot of devs out there or engineering organizations kind of have this love-hate relationship with open source tools. And I have some questions coming for you about security and scalability. But before we get into that, I wanted to start off today by talking to you about the good things of using open source tools at a scaling company.
Can you maybe start with what are the top three benefits for growing companies that are using open source tooling?

**Doron Gill** (2:03)
Okay, so I think that there are many benefits, probably more than three. But let's first of all be honest, engineers to engineers, for some of us, open source is a religion, right? We grew up that way. We think it's the right way to do things.
And I think this is important for people. It's important if your company culture is like that. It also makes a pretty good platform for hiring people. Okay, so I think that the folks are happy to work with open source tools.
First of all, there's a bigger likelihood that they know the tool better, okay? And at the same time, they would also like to work on a set of tools that they will probably use at their next stop, okay? So of course, if you use a proprietary tool or something that was homegrown, then the chances of you meeting that same CRM system, observability system or whatever are very small and you won't be able to make use of the experience and the knowledge that you gained at the current workplace. A lot of us engineers like to be involved. They're open source communities. We like to see our names in the stack overflows of the world in the GitHub repositories of the world. You know, it makes us proud and rightfully so. And we're also helping, you know, it makes us giving us a sense that we're not just developing code, but we're also helping the community.
So finally, I think it's a lot of the cloud native trends and technologies are open source. So interoperability is part of the system. It's already inherently a part of the system.
And of course, it's easy to audit, easy to modify. It's easy to alter to your needs. It also, I would call it future proof, okay? You're not locked down to a certain vendor implementation of an open source and everything is very transparent. So for all those reasons, I think open source is a very good path to go.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:09)
Okay, great. And I know, for example, Logz is providing a service on top of some open source tools, which we'll get into, but are there other open source tools outside of what Logz is providing that you're using internally?

**Doron Gill** (4:28)
Well, yes.
Our IDEs are open source, okay.
That's one thing. We use many open source libraries on top of the main open source tools that we use. We use Kafka, which is open source. We use HAProxy, which is open source. We use MySQL. So yeah, so we're open source all across our development cycle.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:57)
That's amazing. And kind of what I wanted to get into here is that if I'm trying to implement an open source tool to use at a scaling engineering organization, you know, I might have 40 devs, 50 devs, 100 devs.
If I would buy a classic tool, you know, from a Microsoft or something like that, it usually comes with a salesperson and a customer success person and a, you know, tier one support. And I might get some training for my engineering organization. But with open source, you know, it's probably, you know, not exactly the same. Could you walk us through the differences of implementing open source software versus a more classic, you know, sales led implementation?