When you look at the very impressive list of founding members for our new Eclipse Cloud Development (ECD) Tools Working Group, it’s clear that world-leading technology companies strongly believe that open source, cloud native development tools are needed. Our Eclipse Foundation developer community has also enthusiastically embraced the initiative.
To get an insider’s view of why the ECD Tools Working Group initiative is so important, I recently talked to Carlos Andres De La Rosa, an active Eclipse Foundation committer, about why he is getting involved in the Working Group. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.
Q. How did you first become involved in the open source communities at the Eclipse Foundation?
A. I was looking for something interesting from which I could learn something new related to cloud technologies. I found the Eclipse MicroProfile project about two years ago. That was a very interesting topic for me, especially the fault tolerance spec. I added my email address to the mailing list and started joining weekly calls. After a while, I started to contribute to the spec with different things, like improving the spec testing, adding and modifying documentation, and also debating about how to evolve the spec. I became a committer and an entire technological world opened up for me. Jakarta EE was another interesting project that got my attention, so then I became involved with the Jakarta EE community.
I like the fact that Eclipse projects are from the people, for the people, so anyone can learn and contribute to solve problems that can help a lot of developers around the world. It’s shared knowledge and that’s the most important thing for me.
Q. Why did you expand your involvement to include the ECD Tools Working Group?
A. When you’re part of the community, you have access to beta versions of the specifications and projects. I was looking around and I learned about this new project for cloud development tools. I saw the charter and what people were trying to achieve and I knew I wanted to be part of it. It was that simple.
I think cloud technologies will be the biggest and most important topic for the next 10 years. Everything is moving to the cloud, so every day we have more applications, from banking to AI medical analysis services. And, people have easy access to all this thanks to the cloud. I want to be there at the forefront and be working for the community when cloud really starts to grow.
Q. What benefits do you expect to gain from your participation in the ECD Tools Working Group?
A. It’s a huge opportunity to learn from the best engineers in the world because there are a lot of great professionals at the Eclipse Foundation and they have a lot of experience driving technology forward. If you’re new to this field and you’re trying to learn new things, this is a big chance to do it. Also, I’m currently working as a cloud consultant and this project is very related to my day-to-day job, so I can use what I learn in this project to improve my consultancy services.
Q. What impact do you think the ECD Tools Working Group will have on open source, cloud native development?
A. I think the impact will be huge because this group will deliver all of the tools that will be used every day in cloud development. From deploy, scale, debug, and manage, to Cloud Foundry applications, everything is integrated with the Eclipse IDE making the job of developers more productive.
Q. How does your participation in the ECD Tools Working Group fit with the other cloud-related projects you’re involved with at the Eclipse Foundation?
A. Everything is related. MicroProfile provides implementations and specs for capabilities such as fault tolerance that are needed in a microservices architecture to make it easier for developers to create microservices. And the Jakarta EE specs are basically the foundation for the MicroProfile framework because MicroProfile depends on the Java enterprise specs. The Eclipse Cloud Development Tools is a complementary project that helps to complete the framework for cloud native applications. So, they are all part of the cloud ecosystem.
I really think that MicroProfile, Jakarta EE, and now the Eclipse Cloud Development Tools Working Group are the three most important projects at the Eclipse Foundation right now. They will drive the future of cloud technologies and everything that is handled and developed by the community.
Q. What would you say to people who are considering joining the ECD Tools Working Group?
A. I would say “join now!” The most important thing I can tell people is get involved if you want to learn about a cutting-edge technology that will be driving peoples’ lives for a long time. And contribute to help create something meaningful. It’s a community, so it’s for everyone.
