Some companies don’t always get the public credit they deserve for contributing to the open source community software and tools that can enable other developers to move their own projects along quicker and more efficiently.
Companies such as Facebook, Google and others are famous for giving back to the software community valuable code, tools and hardware designs that they can use to solve thorny problems. But others, such as Yahoo and LinkedIn, aren’t as well known for what they are contributing.
Besides the original development of Hadoop a dozen years ago, Yahoo has been an active participant in projects such as those listed on the company’s Github page, in various Apache Software Foundation Communities, and in niche communities, such as CPAN and others.
Last month it released a container-access control to the community, a valuable tool in view of the current popularity of new-gen container/micro-services-based systems.
Mountain View, Calif.-based social network LinkedIn is now stepping up, announcing June 29 that it has open-sourced two incident-escalation tools, called Iris and Oncall; a high-level description of each is below.
LinkedIn said it has seen huge internal adoption of these tools, even from non-technical teams, such as sales. Both are designed for easy adoption by other organizations and are useful for companies ranging in size from small startups to large enterprises.
Tool 1: Iris
Previously, LinkedIn had been relying on an escalation system that required manual forwarding of alerts—a solution that obviously didn’t scale well. With Iris, LinkedIn has created a reliable messaging system that allows users to create flexible, modular escalation plans.
For example, rather than specifically defining users to escalate to, Iris supports custom roles, with pluggable methods of role lookups. It also works with multiple messaging services, including Slack, Twilio and SMS messaging.
Tool 2: Oncall
Oncall is the source from which Iris draws to determine which team members are on-call for a given scenario. It allows managers to define rotating schedules for on-call shifts and provides a calendar for viewing and changing these shifts as needed.
One of the advantages of having Oncall as a separate service is the ability to provide teams with an on-call scheduling tool without necessarily tying in escalation, for non-emergency projects.
Read this blog by LinkedIn’s Daniel Wang for all the engineering details about how these two tools work and for directions on how to obtain them.