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Join the Reactive Foundation

Alexy Khrabrov

Alexy Khrabrov

— 3 min read
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Since April 2020, I have the honor to serve as the first General Manager of the Reactive Foundation (RF), a Linux Foundation (LF) project dedicated to cloud-native applications. We’ve relaunched the project under Linux Foundation, added core OSS projects of global significance, and are poised for rapid growth driving the applications of tomorrow. In this short summary I’d like to outline our core values and invite you to join us.

Reactive has at least three distinct technical meanings:

— ReactiveStreams, as present in the JDK

— Reactive Systems, as described in the Reactive Manifesto

— Functional Reactive Programming, as examplified by the Elm programming language

We begin by focusing on the first two, and in a way, (2) subsumes (1). Reactive Systems, as described in the Manifesto, are

  • Resilient
  • Responsive
  • Message-driven
  • Elastic

If you think of it, these are key features of the “cloud-native” applications (CNAs).

Reactive streams are the most efficient data pipelines to build the reactive systems with.

RF started with RSocket, and existed as a purely technical foundation. The members, representing Pivotal=>VMware, Facebook, Alibaba Cloud, Lightbend, abd Vlingo, each has reactive systems and OSS in use. Several of the members are actively developing their own offerings, such as r2dbc, a reactive database driver from VMware; Akka and its ecosystem from Lightbend, including the most recent Cloudstate and Cloudflow offerings; and Vlingo, an actor framework from the synonymous company; and more. The landscape of reactive projects is wide and growing, including

… and many, many more.

We consider ReactJS and the emerging JAMstack prime candidates for end-to-end CNAs as Reactive Systems. RedwoodJS is one such system, and Fauna, the distributed database integrating with RedwoodJS via GraphQL, is a great use case.

Since May, we’ve added r2dbc, a major driver of the RF agenda going forward with community partners implementing it, from VMware to MariaDB. The Reactive Systems meetup, running since 2015 with topics such as Akka Streams and RxJava, hosted a talk by Rob Hedgepeth, MariaDB developer advocate, on r2dbc. We also hosted a talk on reactive-grpc with Salesforce’s Ryan Michela.

We have relaunched RF as an umbrella project in Linux Foundations and so far brought r2dbc in it with Reactive Streams incoming. The Technical Oversight Committee includes representatives from each project.

Our advisory council consists of the top authorities on Reactive Systems, and includes Ben Christensen of Facebook, Francesco Cesarini of the Erlang Solutions, Violeta Georgieva of VMware Project Reactor, and many other great engineers.

Our conference, Reactive Summit, was donated to RF by Lightbend and will be held on November 11, 2020, online, free to attend globally.

Here’s my vision for an Open-Source foundation, such as RF, which itself is a Linux Foundation project. Having been a community organizer for many years, from meetups, to conferences, to the role of the Chief Community Officer of the Trusted IoT Alliance (now a part of IIC), I have a set of beliefs about the core values which go into an OSS foundation, borne from experience.

tl;dr: we serve the community. We are employed by the members contributing to the common agenda and are responsible for advancing it.

You have to be a servant-leader in every single role in an OSS foundation. No matter what arises in fundraising or even politics, which is inevitable in large projects (like Hadoop), we should never forget whom we serve: the software engineers building open-source software, the companies providing support for it as a product to develop it, and users around the world who entrust their own businesses, and sometimes even lives, in the hands of all who create and shepherd this OSS.

All officers and staff of a community OSS foundation are effectively employees of the members, and serve at the pleasure of the boards representing their core OSS values and needs. The officers are responsible directly and the staff is aligned through the orgchart, on the same shared goals. They are clear:

  • Advance Open-Source as an engineering movement of openness, technical excellence, common standards, shared best practices, interoperability, and composability through reuse, APIs, libraries, etc.
  • Help members advance their OSS projects through education, outreach, and common effort.
  • Enroll new members with kindred OSS projects that they use or support
  • Create benchmarks, examples, and enumerate use cases for easy adoption
  • Run events, meetups, and conferences, which bring the community together and promote our core projects and members, and discover new ones.

I consider communicating with RF members a core part of the GM role. Our board is lead by Jonas Boner, globally recognize for his leadership in the reactive field, and is aligned on the technical advanteges of the Reactive Systems as the way to build the Cloud-Native Applications of tomorrow. I cannot wait to share all of it with you.

We invite developers and companies to engage with Reactive Foundation on its website, spelled the same. If your company would like to add an OSS project to RF or join it as a member, please reach out at alexy@reactive.foundation.

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