AWS’ commitment to open source is evolving, but everyone needs to learn to let some projects “wither and fade” when the time is right, its open source supremo said last week.

The cloud giant has faced criticism in the past for using open source projects while not being a massive contributor itself. More controversially, its re-packaging of key projects – in common with other cloud providers – has been cited as the reason for a number of license switches by erstwhile open source champions.

AWS director of open source strategy and marketing David Nalley, speaking to The Stack at Kubecon last week, said an array of announcements at the conference cemented its commitment to open source.

This included $3m of cloud credits for Kubernetes for 2026, which the cloud giant said would support “Kubernetes development, testing, and scalability”. AWS has been providing cloud credits for the projects since 2019, with its first tranche of $200,000.

“We're renewing that commitment today, which is just a part of our commitment to both CNCF and Kubernetes,” said Nalley. “We're releasing code. We're working on already released projects like containerd. And of course, we released [autoscaler] Karpenter not too long ago.”

This was all "just another signal that we remain committed to the cloud native community in general, and that we're that we continue to be excited about the innovation that this community is driving.”

But, he emphasized, its support for open source extended beyond cloud native infrastructure.  He trumpeted its backing for in-memory database Valkey, which hit 8.1 at the show.

And the firm has thrown its weight behind Iceberg, the open format for massive analytic datasets and data lakes, spanning metadata and schema as well as data. “We're in the process right now of making lots of additional contributions into Iceberg and getting some folks focused on that pretty heavily.”  [Iceberg is an Apache Software Foundation project, and Nalley is president of Apache. ]

Nalley said the firm expected Iceberg to become the de facto table format for data lakes, “You're certainly seeing us support it across EMR and Athena and now S3.”

This meant that “other partners in the space, like Snowflake and Databricks and others, can actually make use of S3 for their workloads with our mutual customers.”

It was also doing a lot of development in the Postgres space, he said. AWS previously addressed a problem with PostgreSQL that was resulting in different implementations returning different collation results. “Which is a really scary thing when you think about how databases are supposed to be deterministic.”

It would have been easier to simply solve it in AWS’s own RDS implementation Nalley said, but “the RDS team went and did a bunch of amazing work in finding the problem [in the core libraries] figuring out how to solve the problem.”

Nalley said it there was no “solitary open source strategy that spans all of AWS….Our service teams have tremendous autonomy.”

“I think what you're seeing is an evolution of our understanding of what open source represents to our supply chain. And so, we've got a lot of different models for how we engage.”

When it comes to the likes of workload manager slurm and observability platform Grafana, for example, “We've got deals with the primary company who is driving a lot of the engineering effort, because we want those people to be successful. We want it to remain open source.”

At the same time, Nalley said, it was investing “a lot of engineers” in projects like Rust, OpenJDK and PostgreSQL. And it also sponsored foundations, and offered cloud credits for development efforts. “And in other cases we do all three,” he added.

“A lot of it comes into how we're looking at business continuity and protecting experiences for our customers. But I do think you're seeing an evolution in the maturation of how we regard open source.”

That includes accepting that some projects have a “natural lifecycle”. The point was not to artificially prop up projects that people no longer found useful, he said. Rather, he said, it wanted to ensure the resiliency of those projects that customers need to remain viable. The firm looks at this from a “business continuity risk perspective,” Nalley said.

“Our customers have repeatedly told us that they care deeply about open source. They prefer open source, and many of them have an open source first mindset. And as a result, we are going to be focused on our customers’ interests to make sure that they're preserved.”

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