Open source software outsourcing and Latin America: a great duo

Your business depends on software. Not only do your employees need the platforms and applications they need to be productive throughout the day, but your company must also have the back-end software necessary to power your supply chain. Without these tools, you can't reliably fulfill orders, track packages, manage customer or employee relationships, deploy services, or do something as simple as have a website.

If your company is an enterprise type (large corporations that manage hundreds or even thousands of employees), it is more than likely that your development chain will not only be complicated, but it can also become incredibly expensive. Of course, you can drastically reduce this cost by going the open source route. In many cases, you will have no choice but to opt for open source software.

The transition to open source is imminent

Why? Because open source powers the enterprise backend. According to the State of Enterprise Open Source (a 2019 survey compiled by Red Hat), 69% of respondents said open source was extremely important and only 1% did not use open source software. These are very revealing numbers. In fact, it's quite easy to assume that your company is already using open source or will do so in the near future.

When that time comes, if you don't have the skills in-house to employ open source technology, you may have to turn to companies like Latin America Software Outsourcing to do so. If this happens, you might be wondering how such an entity could help you add open source to your development chain.

Let's find out.

#1 What is open source?

Before we discuss how open source can be implemented in your development chain, you may need a quick lesson in what open source is. The concept is quite simple: open source software released under a license that allows the user to download an application's code, change the code, and redistribute the code with the changes included.

According to OpenSource.com, “Open source licenses give computer users permission to use open source software for any purpose they wish. Some open source licenses – what some people call “copyleft” licenses – stipulate that anyone who releases a modified open source program must also release the source code for that program along with it.”

Curious about some examples of open source software used in companies? Here is a short list of popular titles:

• Kubernetes
• Docker
• NGINX
• MySQL
• WordPress
• Git
• Woocommerce
• Bugzila
• Open project
• Node.JS
• Eclipse
• Initialization

Without some of the above, companies would have difficulty innovating and competing. In fact, technologies like the cloud and blockchain would never have existed without open source.

With this understanding, let's discover how software outsourcing in Latin America can help your company.

#2 Talent needed

Your company may have a solid set of developers and administrators. But does this internal talent pool have enough experience with open source software to make it part of their development pipeline? It's one thing to be able to deploy, say, a website with NGINX, but integrating it with your current tools and making it scalable requires special skills.

Do your current in-house developers know Java, JavaScript, Ruby or Go? Otherwise, your company may have difficulty integrating open source into its development chain.

If you find that your current crop of developers lack these skills, you can easily augment that talent pool with an outsourced team to enhance your development team to include the necessary talent.

#3 Integration with APIs

These same developers will need to be able to integrate any software they build (or retool, in the case of open source) with existing or internally generated APIs. API integration is an extremely important link in the development chain. Without the ability to use multiple APIs, you won't be able to bring different software tools together.

For example: Let's say you've built a powerful eCommerce platform and want to allow users to log in to your website with third-party accounts (like Facebook or Google). For this, you would have to be able to integrate your website with Google Login or Facebook Login API . You will likely need to integrate these hooks and APIs into various open source software. Or you might be building something internally for this purpose. Chances are very high that what your team is developing will rely on open source software.

When the time comes to integrate these APIs, will your team be up to the task?

#4 Containers, containers, containers

No matter where you look in the business landscape, you'll see (or read about) companies making the switch to containers. There's a good reason for this: containers are incredibly flexible and agile.

Retail, communications, IT services, staffing and recruitment, hospitals and healthcare, higher education, insurance and financial services all make use of container technology. Fortune 100 companies such as JPMorgan Chase, ThoughtWorks, Neudesic, and SLALOM use container technology.

The vast majority of the technology that powers containers is open source. It is also considerably challenging. You shouldn't let this stop your company from adopting containers, as with them you can create an incredibly agile and automated development pipeline.

#5 Stacks of batteries

A stack is a collection of software that integrates to form a cohesive whole. One of the best known (and used) stacks is the LAMP stack. That's it:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP

The LAMP stack is used everywhere. And although it is very easy to install a LAMP stack (for example, in Ubuntu, this stack can be installed with the command sudo apt-get install lamp-server^ ), developing your company's web presence with this stack is not so simple . To do this, you may need to enlist the help of software outsourcing in Latin America.

And the LAMP stack is not the only stack on the block. There are web development stacks like:

• AVERAGE (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS)
• Meteor
• Django
• Ruby on the rails

There are even company-specific stacks like:

• Airbnb technology stack (JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, Amazon RDS, Hadoop, NGINX)
• Facebook Tech Stack (PHP, GraphQL, Hack, Tornado, Cassandra, RocksDB, Beringei, Memcached)
• Pinterest TechStack (Python, Java, Go, Django, Javascript MVC, MySQL, Hadoop, HBase, Memcached, Redis, NGINX)
• Uber Tech Stack (Python, Java, Go, Objective-C, Node.js, Apache Thrift, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, NGINX)

Is your current development team capable of working with these stacks? If not, you might consider hiring an outsourced team.

Integrating open source into your development chain

Is it necessary to integrate open source into your development chain? No. Will it help your business grow in ways you probably never considered? Quite possible. If you want to not only create a more reliable enterprise platform, but also expand your offerings, compete, and rise above the competition, open source is the way to go.