"Using open source means you're hiring the whole world as your support system"

Suman Debnath, Principal Machine Learning Advocate at AWS has transitioned from having zero knowledge about open source to becoming an assertive community leader in this space. He has delivered over 100 international conference keynotes, driving engagement across tech communities, and attributes this success to his community members. This expansive conversation with OSFY’s Yashasvini Razdan on Suman’s journey in this domain is a testament to the power of open source.

- Yashasvini Razdan

A newly minted electronics and telecommunications engineering graduate, Suman’s first encounter with open source, like many others, was driven by necessity. As a performance consultant for Hitachi Data Systems in 2008, while working on benchmark raw/ application performance testing on HDS’ (now Hitachi Vantara) modular storage systems, Suman was searching for a tool that would help him with benchmarking, when he came across the flexible I/O tester or FIO. “I used it for two weeks but ran into some issues and needed to learn a few more configurations. I was still unaware of the power of the open-source community at that time,” he says, recalling the inexperience of his youth with a smile on his face.

When Suman searched for a solution he realised that multiple people had similar queries, and many others were resolving them. “That was when I realised what open source meant. I could request feature updates, and experts on GitHub sat down to act on those requests! I was amazed,” he exclaims.

The gateway to open source

From that point on, Suman entered a whole new world of GitHub and began contributing to projects along with 300 other contributors. He went on to work with and contribute to the documentation of ezFIO, a user-friendly graphical interface or wrapper designed to simplify the usage of FIO.

He didn’t stop at benchmarking tools. The world of open source had opened a new gateway. “In 2015, there was a requirement to create a test bed where I had to set up more than 50 VMs and configure them in a certain way. I came across this tool, Ansible, which allowed me to automate and update software across all the machines. I learned that within 10-12 days! I had to share my feat with the world,” he remarks.