As COVID-19 continues to make clear, being adaptable and resilient when the world changes can help a business stay alive. At Elastic, we know from experience that being distributed helps build a strong company that can scale and adapt as new challenges arise. In the spirit of open source and our relationship with the Elastic community, we’ve been offering tips and tricks on our blog and on social media about how to work effectively while remote.

More than 2,000 developers from around the world participated in our open source bot hackfest, which we hosted on HackerEarth from January 10 through March 2. The goal of the event was to work with our community to create open source chatbots that integrate with Mattermost to accelerate DevOps and DevSecOps workflows, and we received many amazing submissions! We gave away $10,000 in prizes, including $6,000 cash to our top contributors.

Open source software development can have a reputation for abrasive behavior. The search community is a clear counterexample for me, with a culture that emphasizes respect and acceptance. This culture played an important part in my own path to open source development. A little over six years ago, I was a wide-eyed software engineer settling into my first full-time job.

The infrastructure that runs your applications can be nearly as complex as the applications it supports. This complexity generally scales with the resilience of the architecture of your application, the scaling needs, and any security concerns. Thus, successful infrastructure for traditional applications often relies on a comprehensive tooling suite that allows the infrastructure engineers to iterate upon and improve your application’s resources.

Ever walk into a corner market, push on the door and find it won’t open? You look down at the handle and are reminded by a sign on the door that you have to “pull” to open it? The LogicMonitor platform uses an agentless collector to pull metrics from thousands of devices and resources into a unified monitoring view (no agents required). We currently offer more than 2,000 LogicModules out-of-the-box that gather metrics from all kinds of systems using many different protocols.

How critical are open source applications for modern application and infrastructure modernization? Red Hat’s The State of Enterprise Open Source report found that more than two-thirds of IT leaders believe that open source software has a very important role to play in the enterprise and 59% of respondents expect to increase their use of open source in the next 12 months.

Since our inception, open source contributions have been integral to our business and success. This October, as we participated in the great Hacktoberfest event, organized by Digital Ocean and hosted by GitHub and this month as we host our own hackathon event, we reflect upon and appreciate our community.

We as a company, and I as a human have been enormous beneficiaries of open source. I remember as a kid, my brothers setup a Renegade BBS so other people could call our computer. A few years later I built my first server running on NetBSD. And of course, we all used the internet. Open source has powered so much of my life. I still remember my first accepted open-source contribution, it was an incredibly minor fix for an HTML5 Quake game, but wow was I proud.

In March, we awarded Sentry’s Open Source Grant to Latinx non-profit Techqueria. Here’s a look at their progress, six months later.

Cortex, the open source, horizontally-scalable, highly-available, clustered Prometheus implementation that powers Grafana Cloud’s Hosted Prometheus cut its first release yesterday! This release was led by Chris Marchbanks from Splunk, who put together the whole release process and shepherded this first release.