Year in Review: 2018 Highlights from Uber Open Source

The diversity of Uber’s open source offerings speaks to the complexity of our technology stack and the business problems we use these projects to solve. Open source also gives our engineers, data scientists, and researchers the opportunity to further build out their projects for the benefit of the broader technical community.

In this spirit, Uber Open Source developed our mission statement: enabling collaboration through open source. From joining The Linux Foundation as a Gold member to releasing new data visualization, metrics monitoring, and front-end development frameworks and even hosting the first-ever Uber Open Summit, 2018 was busy for our team. As the year draws to a close, here are some of our 2018 highlights:

Three of Uber’s open source software received the honors from the community:

The Best Open Source Software for Cloud Computing

Jaeger, now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation-hosted project, made it onto InfoWorld’s list of the best open source software for cloud computing in the last two years (2017 and 2018). An end-to-end distributed tracing system, Jaeger can be used for monitoring microservices-based systems.

More about Jaeger: Project website || GitHub || Eng Blog Article || Yuri Shkuro Interview

The Best Open Source Software for Machine Learning

Horovod, now an LF Deep Learning Foundation-hosted project, won a place on InfoWorld’s list of best open source software for machine learning. Horovod is a distributed training framework for TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch, and is now included in the machine learning suite offered by most cloud providers. Horovod is leveraged by companies and organizations worldwide to make distributed deep learning fast and easy to use.

More about Horovod: Project website || GitHub || Eng Blog Article || Alex Sergeev Interview 

Information is Beautiful Award, Visualization and Information Design Category

Kepler.gl, Uber’s open source geospatial analysis tool for large-scale data sets, won gold at the 7th annual Information is Beautiful Awards in the Visualization and Information Design category. Shan He, above, lead architect for Kepler.gl, accepted the award on behalf of her team at the awards ceremony in NYC.

More about kepler.gl: Project website || GitHub || Eng Blog Article || Shan He Interview

This year, Uber open sourced 50 new projects and published 30 related articles. These include kepler.gl and M3, as well as Jaeger, Horovod, and deck.gl. We also launched the Uber Research GitHub org to host research projects at Uber.

In May 2018, Uber’s Visualization team introduced kepler.gl, our open source data agnostic, high performance web-based application for large-scale geospatial visualizations.

In August 2018, Uber’s web platform team open sourced Fusion.js, our web development framework that supports modern features and integrations that make it easy to build lightweight, high-performing apps for the web.

In August 2018, we launched M3, our open source, large-scale metrics platform for Prometheus. In the following months, we showcased how our Observability team at Uber leverages the M3 query engine, our M3-compatible in-house alerting systems, and other members of this product suite to manage the ever-expanding dimensionality and usage of our metrics. During KubeCon North America 2018, Matt Schallert and Celina Ward of our NYC-based Observability team further exhibited the utility of the project by delivering a keynote on how to facilitate large-scale, automated storage with M3 and Kubernetes.

We presented more than 100 talks and hosted 17 events globally in 2018 to meet with our community and provide a face to face collaboration opportunities. We also hosted our first Open Summit, an event consisting of three tracks filled with presentations on our top projects.

To continue our commitment to collaborating with the community and working with other leaders in the space to solve complex technical problems and further promote open source adoption globally, we extended our support to the Linux Foundation and its open source initiatives. We joined  the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member, furthering our support for the open source community. In December, we joined the OpenChain Project as a Platinum member. As part of the OpenChain Project’s governing board, Uber will help create best practices and define standards for open source software compliance. We also joined The Linux Foundation’s TODO Group, to collaborate with companies on ways to run effective open source programs and projects.

We look forward to greater collaboration in 2019—and beyond.

Learn more about Uber Open Source through the the Uber Eng Twitter account and Uber Open Source Facebook page.

Brian Hsieh leads Open Source at Uber, managing strategy, governance, inbound and outbound licensing, developer advocacy, community building, and foundation relationships. He joined Uber in November 2017.