How to make any open source project production-ready?
We've all made open-source projects, but monetizing them is hard.
Making the projects "production-ready" is equally as difficult if not more.
I'm toying with the idea of building a "productionize an open source project" service.
Let's take Kafka & Zookeeper for example, a notoriosly painful project to spin up.
Say you want to spin up a Kafka cluster on multiple ec2 instances. You first define your configurations (brokers count, topic, etc.), select the instance size and click "deploy".
Then on the backend, someone with devops experience (like me) will create the ec2 instance(s), install kafka, get it production ready, and then hand over the keys to you.
So questions:
Open source maintainers: would you put something like this on your project if it meant affiliate cash per deployment?
Developers: would you pay for a professional production deployment of an open-source project?
A concept I got heavily invested in is the "Commercially Supported Open Source" style of doing things. It was "selling" open source software (like you've got above, deployment, support, etc) - with the promise of giving back and pushing back code commits of select items that were done for clients in a non-proprietary fashion.
I worked for multiple organizations (sales and marketing) where it was our express job to sell this. Especially in government (GSA schedule) sales where Devs WANT open source tools but government buying needs a "warranty" or someone to blame - which is where commercially supporting open source comes in.
As far as pay-for-deployment, I don't see many bites; but professionally deploying and maintaining and on-call supporting could be a great fee and retainer based business.
The eclipse foundation (eclipse.org) is a great example of the global practice of this.
I don't see hobbyists or small shops buying, but I know from experience that gov and enterprise are always buying open source projects/support.
No, but I am comfortable paying for fully hosted open-source projects. Think wordpress for example: I would pay a good fee for someone to deploy a new WP instance and to keep it up to date so I could concentrate on developing the websites themselves (if I still made websites).