Open-source becoming a core element of Intuit’s engineering and product development culture

Open Source is an integral part of Intuit’s engineering culture. The adoption of open-source technology is rapidly growing in the digital workplace. This shift plays a vital role in software development, especially during an era of continuous integration, deployment, and daily software updates.

Providing more details about Intuit's open-source infrastructure and some of its key projects, Kalyan Kolachala, Director - Product Development, Intuit speaks to VARINDIA on how the company is guided by the strong culture of experimentation, collaboration and rapid innovation -

How has Intuit's platform-mindset, culture of experimentation, and focus on collaboration contributed to their velocity of innovation?

Intuit is transforming from a tax and accounting platform, where consumers and small businesses have to do the work, to a global financial technology platform, where we do the hard work for them by embracing a comprehensive platform approach. This shift, coupled with a strategic adoption of open-source, established artificial intelligence foundation, rich data platform and cloud-native technologies, has significantly accelerated innovation, improved customer experiences and enhanced product quality. Our robust AI platform is at the center of technological advancements, allowing us to deliver on our AI-driven expert platform strategy.

Intuit is uniquely positioned to lead the next wave of transformation and disruption and at the heart of this success, is the strong culture of experimentation, collaboration and rapid innovation happening across the global tech ecosystem.  Intuit has also embraced artificial intelligence as a core component of their innovation strategy.

Intuit actively promotes continuous learning and experimentation through various initiatives like Global Engineering Days, hackathons, and training programs. These initiatives encourage and challenge teams to explore new technologies and develop innovative solutions to customer problems.

Furthermore, Intuit's focus on customer-driven innovation, exemplified by their Customer Driven Innovation (CDI) and Design for Delight (D4D) approaches, ensures that their innovations are directly aligned with solving real customer problems. This customer-centric approach, combined with their platform strategy and collaborative culture, has enabled Intuit to significantly increase their development velocity.

Can you provide details about Intuit's open-source infrastructure and highlight some of their key projects like Argo, Karate, CardPats, and BenTen?

Intuit has fully embraced open-source technologies in its product development. Intuit heavily contributes to cloud-native open-source software such as Argo, Kubernetes, Istio, Prometheus, OPA, Falcon, Mimir and OpenTelemetry at scale. These technologies have been foundational in creating Intuit's common cloud-native platform, enabling better scalability and reliability for its financial products and services.

One of Intuit's most successful open-source projects is the Argo Project, which is a CNCF graduated project. Argo provides a suite of Kubernetes-native tools for managing deployments and workflows on Kubernetes, enabling Intuit to streamline and standardize its development processes and significantly improve development productivity.  Intuit's focus on open-source and cloud-native technologies has led to several successful innovations and projects, allowing the company to harness the latest technologies and industry best practices, resulting in superior products and services for its customers.

What strategies can enterprises employ to successfully integrate open-source culture in a collaborative manner within their organizations?

Enterprises can successfully integrate open-source culture by implementing a multi-faceted approach that starts with securing leadership buy-in. This top-level support is crucial for driving adoption across the organization. Clear policies and guidelines should be established to provide clarity on open-source usage, contribution, and licensing, reducing potential risks. Offering workshops and resources helps familiarize employees with open-source principles, tools, and best practices. To further encourage participation, companies should incentivize contributions by recognizing and rewarding employees who engage with open-source projects, both internally and externally.

Creating internal platforms for sharing and collaborating on open-source projects can foster a culture of innovation and knowledge sharing. For example, at Intuit we have an annual open-source fest called Hacktoberfest that encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October.

Starting with small pilot projects allows organizations to demonstrate value and build momentum before scaling open-source practices more broadly. Engaging with external open-source communities and foundations provides valuable learning opportunities and avenues for contribution. Successful integration also involves aligning open-source practices with existing development workflows and tools. By tracking and communicating the benefits of open-source adoption, such as increased innovation, cost savings, and talent attraction, enterprises can reinforce the value of this collaborative approach and ensure its continued growth within the organization.

Could you share the success story of the Argo project and explain how it has enabled scale for running applications in the public cloud?

The Argo project is one of Intuit's most successful open-source contributions, now a graduated project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Argo provides a suite of Kubernetes-native tools for managing deployments and workflows on Kubernetes, enabling streamlined and standardized development processes. Argo has been instrumental in enabling Intuit to achieve significant scale in running applications in the public cloud. It allows for efficient management of complex workflows and deployments across Intuit's extensive Kubernetes infrastructure, which includes over 300 Kubernetes clusters running more than 3,500 services across Intuit's flagship products like TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and MailChimp.

The project has improved Intuit's development velocity by simplifying and standardizing build, deploy, and run processes with embedded best practices. This has resulted in a 6X increase in development speed over the past few years. During peak tax season, Intuit can process up to 42 billion transactions with 100% availability, showcasing the scalability and reliability enabled by Argo and other cloud-native technologies.

What are the major open-source technology trends expected to shape the industry in 2024?

In 2024, artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to be at the forefront, with open-source frameworks and tools evolving to make AI more efficient and accessible. Open source LLMs, embedding models, MLOps/LLMOps infrastructure, Agent/RAG frameworks, no-code/low code tools to democratize genAI are some of the trends.

Platform technologies which require high scale and performance will be increasingly based on efficient, performant, low latency, compiled languages such as C++ and Rust. Some examples seeing huge adoption are Redpanda (C++, messaging), ScyllaDB (C++, NoSQL DB), ClickHouse (C++, Analytical DB), Apache DataFusion (Rust, query engine) and Velox (C++, query engine). These languages are compiled, have low overhead and runtime cost, do not need JVMs or garbage collection, and support low level optimization such as shard/thread per core architecture and customized caching. This focus on performance and efficiency significantly contributes to sustainability by reducing energy usage.

Cloud-native technologies, particularly Kubernetes and its ecosystem, will form the foundation for AI infrastructure. There will be increased adoption and convergence of Data LakeHouse technologies and standards such as Apache Iceberg which can work with distributed query engines such as Presto, Trino, Ballista powered by Velox and Datafusion.

DevOps and GitOps practices will also become more ingrained in software development processes, with open-source tools that streamline the entire lifecycle gaining prominence. Security and privacy will remain critical concerns, driving the development of open-source tools that leverage AI for enhanced threat detection and protection. As organizations grapple with increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, these technologies will play a crucial role in maintaining robust security postures.