Contributors: Stephen Klugherz, Ross Sbriscia, Jeremy Justus, Andy Deese

In the early 2010’s, Optum, like many large companies was running a mix of commercial products for API management, security gateways and web application firewalls. In addition to being costly, this made Optum dependent on a system where expertise was “rented” from vendors, who’s lack of familiarity with our environment often lead to poor quality outcomes. To combat this, a small team of skilled engineers worked toward standing up an equivalent capability based on an open source API gateway, Kong. Through this effort, we learned that success is only possible with community engagement and more importantly, giving back. These are the three principles we have followed to maximize our benefit from the community.

1. Shift Your Mindset

The journey to successfully leveraging an open source product begins with a mindset shift from the commercial paradigm of renting expertise, to cultivating internal experts and reciprocity. This starts with how you think of the team’s relationship to the product. We need to approach the product as if we owned the code. There are no other organizations on the hook to solve problems. It is critical to cultivate internal engineering experts that know the code, not just operations. Along with furthering innovation, this mentality forms the basis of a relationship with the community and is the foundation of the other two principles.

2. Don’t Just Ask, Engage

So how do we go about cultivating internal experts? The best way is to participate in the Opens-source community; Interact with engineers on equal footing, investigate and debate the nature of the problems and the solutions. This collaboration benefits both parties. The community benefits from the feedback given, features offered, and bugs reported. Our internal team benefits, not only by finding solutions to our requirements, but also through the knowledge we gain from these interactions. The community will help you with the same level of effort you put in to helping yourself. We are energized by people taking an interest in our work.

3. Influence through Giving Back

Ultimately, a need will arise to affect product direction. Whether it be a new feature, a bugfix or a small improvement; the best way to deliver a high-quality, sustainable change is to contribute it back to the open source product. Optum’s contributions to Kong include many core-platform fixes, such as improvements to the database connector, core TLS/SSL and connection management alterations, internal cache re-building improvements, and driving most of the patch versions seen in the 2.1.x series. Optum has also contributed 13 new Kong API gateway plugins, in addition to modifying several default ones. We have three key takeaways from these experiences: First, opening your work to the community provides an unparalleled level of code review and quality assurance. Secondly, presenting your ideas enables creative programmers to build on an improve your solution, providing a better outcome than could have been developed individually. Giving back has allowed us to leverage a worldwide group of talented engineers as a force multiplier allowing our small team of experts to deliver beyond what their numbers suggest they could. Finally, being an active community member elevates the visibility of the problem or feature we are addressing within community.

Engagement with the opensource community has been critical to the success of Optum’s API gateway. Through our efforts we have found that to fully realize the benefits of the opensource model, it takes more than simply installing the software. The full benefits scale with the team’s effort to participate in the community. To participate, organizations need to shift toward an ownership model, cultivating experts, have those experts engage the community as peers, and ultimately contribute their ideas back. Doing so, opens a world of expertise for you to leverage and allows delivery of capabilities beyond what could be delivered in a silo.

This post is part of the 2020 ATO Sponsor Series where sponsors discuss a a topic of interest, a session they're hosting or simply what they'll be doing in the exhibit area. Optum is a Platinum level sponsor.