Dmitri says “good bye”

06/06/2019
by Dmitri Zimine

Dear StackStorm. You have grown up. The time has come for us to part ways. You will continue the life of mature, established open-source project, with growing community. I will step aside, watch with pride your successes, and be always here to help when you need me.

We started StackStorm six years ago. Thinking of OpenStack automation at first, we quickly realized our broader mission as an event driven automation – IFTTT for DevOps.We had build great technology, but I can’t tell StackStorm’s story without mentioning Evan Powell — co-founder, CEO, partner — who turned us into a business and made StackStorm take off. StackStorm was growing: we have been building the product, growing our open-source community, supporting more and more users and a broad variety of automations. In 2016 StackStorm the company got acquired: a moderate success for investors, a new page for StackStorm, the project.

Too many projects don’t survive an acquisition. We survived two. It was rough: I spent two nerve-wracking years protecting StackStorm from all the deadly threats and plowing paths for it to thrive. Kudos to the team for pulling it out: StackStorm is still run by most of the founding crew, and we picked a few good fellows on the way. What held us through the rough times? Belief in the mission, sense of responsibility to our customers, team comradery, and sheer fun of working  on a cool open-source tech.

StackStorm stands strong now: it is a mature OpenSource project, with loyal community of users averaging ~1,200 installations/month, and over 400 contributors. It remains unique in class: an event driven workflow-centric automation, with infrastructure as code, built-to-scale micro-service architecture, and rich extensibility. A power tool for power users. It helps teams at run massive operations: Target, Dimension Data, Cisco, Verizon to name just a few from the growing hall of fame.

For the past year, StackStorm has been run by the team. I stepped aside, and worked with the guys to pass them all I knew about running the project. They rock. Matt Stone took over running engineering kindergarten. Lindsay Hill helps the community grow. Tomaz Muraus and Winson Chan – the founding crew – are driving technical directions for the team and external contributions. Lakshmi Kannan continues to oversee the architecture. It’s been my joy to see how well they run the show.

A final touch.We decided to move StackStorm under Linux Foundation. Extreme Networks had been a great home for the StackStorm. Yet we learned that vendor affiliation slows down the adoption. Users demand automation platform to be independent and vendor-agnostic. Extreme recognizes this need and believes in doing the right thing for the users. The official announcement is coming soon, stay tuned!


My mission is now complete. StackStorm will live the life of mature, established open-source project, with growing community.  I will step aside, watch with pride your successes, and be always here to help when you need me. A founder can not un-found oneself. I will be a part of StackStorm community – so natural now with upcoming Foundation governance model. Do ping me on Slack or drop me a line to my @stackstorm.com email.