Open-Source & the Future of Data: A Conversation with Sam Ramji

Over the course of his 25-year career, Sam Ramji, who joined DataStax as chief strategy officer in December 2019, has done it all. 
 
He worked for five years at Microsoft, meeting directly with Bill Gates while focusing on getting the company to embrace open source. He helped launch Microsoft’s first open-source foundation, The Outercurve Foundation, and served as secretary of the board of directors there for more than six years. Sam was also the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, chief strategy officer at Apigee, VP of product management at Google, and VP of cloud platform at Autodesk, among others.
 
Recently, Sam sat down with Jeff Carpenter, developer advocate at DataStax and host of our podcast, The Distributed Data Show. The conversation was a lively and engaging one, spilling over into two episodes.
 
Listen to both to learn more about:

• The journey that led Sam to become a software engineer and what he did before joining DataStax
• How the opportunity to work on scale-out data and build technologies designed for the next decade attracted him to DataStax
• How Apache Cassandra™ solves an “embarrassingly difficult problem” because  “distributed databases are really, really hard. It takes a long time for those systems to harden.”
• How the Cloud Native Computing Foundation divvies up responsibilities: “Let’s let the technical team be supreme in their own domain and let’s have no overlaps between that and the business team.”
• What Sam likes most about open source: “I think that creates a lot more room for innovation, a lot more speed of movement and a lot more safety for users.”
• Why community is at the core of every successful open source project 
• Why not every open source project needs to move at the same speed
• The role Sam believes AI will play in the databases of the future and what he thinks about AI more generally
• How the 2000s were about networking, the 2010s were about compute, and the 2020s will be about data

Hear Sam’s complete thoughts by listening to both episodes:

• Episode 138: Open Source Strategy
• Episode 139: The Decade of Scale out Data