Mattermost News

Federal agencies depend on internal software development teams to build the digital capabilities that enable them to carry out their missions. And a growing number of organizations are investing in application development accordingly.

The military in particular has doubled down on software factories such as the Air Force’s Platform One and Space Force’s Space Camp. The software-factory approach emphasizes agile development methodologies like DevSecOps, plus extensive use of open source code to ensure rapid development and strong security. The goal is to enable organizations to quickly benefit from new software functionality.

In every industry, software is essential to success. Federal agencies rely on in-house application development to create software that enables them to improve internal operations and serve constituencies more effectively. Even if they take advantage of commercial off-the-shelf software, they still need customization to link programs together or meet unique regulatory requirements.

But application development can be a slow, costly and resource-intensive undertaking. Development teams try to automate and accelerate the process through modern methodologies such as DevSecOps, which aims to coordinate the activities of the development, security and operations functions.

Military teams increasingly rely on real-time information and analysis for make-or-break decisions in the battlespace. If data can’t be accessed and shared the moment it’s needed, the result can be inaccurate decisions and wrong actions.

But warfighters don’t operate in a vacuum. They need to coordinate their decisions and actions with other personnel. Stakeholders at the mission, enterprise, and tactical levels all require unified visibility and understanding for missions to achieve battlespace dominance — and that’s why teams require an effective collaboration platform.

While the market has changed, for many developers, fragmented tools remain a top productivity challenge. Investing in modern tools and programming languages while also removing tech complexities are the keys to improving productivity and simultaneously creating a better developer experience. This is why organizations must implement open source applications so developers can have complete visibility and control over the entire stack.

With tool fragmentation causing a number of distractions, developers can become frustrated and spend time responding to every individual incident. This poses the threat of a developer losing their love of the work. By doing away with fragmentation from old technology and selecting relevant solutions, business leaders allow developers to do what they do best: Develop software.

When organizational leaders empower their developers, they in turn find their product teams are more productive and feel more tied to the organization as well as their customers and each other. Thus, what is best for developers is best for the organization at large.

Despite context-switching challenges, there was a 7% rise in employee usage of real-time mobile messaging tools in the past three years, according to a Gartner survey released in 2021.

“I think the first thing that IT leaders need to understand is that Gen Z does not use email to communicate,” Ian Tien, CEO and co-founder of Mattermost, said. “Gen Z has its own culture and its own norms of efficiency, and they’re going to go to the workplace that is compatible with how they work.”

I recently met with Ian Tien, CEO, and co-founder of Mattermost, to understand some general techniques organizations should consider to protect modern open-source software. According to Tien, who recently spoke on this subject at Collision Conference, open-source shines in resiliency, transparency, and value efficiency. Yet, any useful system has its share of vulnerabilities. Below, we’ll look at five ways IT can work to secure its commitment to open-source software to create safer end systems and applications.

• Run your own Slack alternative: What developer doesn’t like to use an open-source option for a popular app, just for fun? Probably many. But, if you like to tinker around, you might want to satisfy your urge with something like MatterMost.

Mattermost

Mattermost is another self-hosted messaging tool that supports team messaging, but in this case, it’s designed especially for software development. The project boasts a vibrant community, which has built out a good server for securely managing the message flow. What really sets Mattermost apart is its collection of software development playbooks with special features like checklists and coding retrospectives. Mattermost is also available as a web application and a mobile tool.

Slack is facing stiff competition from the likes of Microsoft Teams, which also includes a free tier and is tricky to avoid if you are a Microsoft 365 customer. Then there is Matrix, which recently nosed its way past the 60 million user mark. Or that communication and collaboration itch could always be scratched by Mattermost.

With Mattermost, you can collaborate from any location at any time. To remain in touch wherever you are, you can effortlessly exchange files across the web, desktop, and mobile phone, establish new channels, tag individuals, and send messages via private or group chat.

A digital shared incident response system allows teams to easily see and understand what playbooks they’re running, who is responsible for what, steps that have been taken (and still need to be completed), and more. They can communicate with one another via real-time collaboration and chat tools integrated with their toolchains, remaining well-informed throughout the entire incident response process.

We measured three different metrics important to app developers: TTI, binary size, and memory consumption. We used the React Native app Mattermost for testing. We ran these experiments for both Android and iOS on high end hardware from 2020.

• TTI, or time to interactive, is the duration of time from the app being launched to the user being able to interact with it. For this benchmark, we define it as the time from pressing the app icon to the first screen being rendered. We also show screen recordings of starting up Mattermost.
• The binary size was measured as APK size on android and IPA size on iOS.
• The memory consumption data was collected by using the Mattermost app over the span of a couple minutes. The same actions were performed in the app on both engines.

This collaboration-focused approach to delivering an integrated developer experience is what paves the way for development teams to simultaneously improve efficiency and outcomes. “Good developer experience supports innovation, iteration, safety and velocity,” Lachhman says. “Great developer experience allows developers to focus on and experiment with what is important — and not pick up technical debt with non-functional or application operational concerns (such as scaling and robustness) along the way.”

Fragmented tools create fragmented workflows that add friction and slow down developer teams, negatively impacting productivity. This is an everyday struggle in the dev world and one that organizations need to invest in solving. With the rate of new software development, businesses cannot afford to hinder their developers. Open-source collaboration tools solve many problems and allow developers to focus on what they do best: innovating.

To stay competitive, organizations must invest in enabling productive team collaboration. From shipping faster and ensuring organizational security to retaining high-performing members, organizations must empower their teams not just to perform well as individuals, but to collaborate more effectively.

Digital playbooks allow incident response coordinators and other first responders to plan, execute and monitor their operations through their tablets, smartphones, or laptops. They can receive status updates in real-time and quickly determine what needs to happen during an event without having to sift through massive binders. Team members can see who owns what task, the real-time status of the item and communicate across agencies. As the process is executed, everything is automatically documented for future improvements and reference.

Today, the company announced its Mattermost 7.0 platform that brings new voice call, workflow templates and an application framework to the open-source technology. The new release builds on capabilities the company launched with its 6.0 update in October 2021. Mattermost competes against multiple large entities, including Slack, Atlassian and Asana, for a piece of the growing market for collaboration tools. Mattermost has a particular focus, however, on developer enablement, though the platform can also be used for security and IT operations as well.

The Mattermost developer collaboration platform now features enhanced capabilities to enable real-time collaboration for critical developer use cases such as operating incident response war rooms, providing documented processes and communication lines to technical teams during outages, and supporting agile, CI/CD, and DevOps release methodologies.

“We always like to try to participate in standards and stuff like that,” says Hulen, “But at the end of the day, you know, we’re open source. I don’t think you can get a better standard than that…”

Mattermost is keen on integrations. “We do a lot of things to make integrations easier,” says Hulen, “Like, as an example, our web hooks and slash commands are binary level protocol compatible with Slack.

“At Intellyx, we get dozens of PR pitches each day from a wide range of technology vendors,” said Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx. “We will only set up briefings with the most disruptive and innovative firms of the lot. That’s why it made sense for us to call out the companies that made the cut.”

The short version of what we did was leverage the orchestration power of Kubernetes and add another layer of orchestration on top of that, which was much more Mattermost-aware, to be able to deploy individual instances of Mattermost quickly and on-demand when a customer signs up for a workspace. This means that each customer who has their own workspace gets their own deployment of single-tenant Mattermost and a set of pods that is only for them.

Additionally, all of this wouldn’t be possible without a ton of other great, open source CNCF projects that we built our Cloud with:

• Prometheus and Thanos for monitoring
• Fluent Bit for log collection
• Flux and ArgoCD for automated deployments
• Helm and the Operator Framework for building and managing deployments
• Chaos Mesh for chaos fault simulation and reliability testing
• And others!

“Removing information silos can also increase innovation by pollinating ideas across a broad range of perspectives. You get diverse perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, and cultural input, which helps uncover blind spots and makes solutions stronger.”

What do software developers want out of their careers in 2022? According to a recent survey by Stack Overflow, 39% want to work with the latest technologies. This is where open source can help.

The open source community provides many of the new technologies developers enjoy. The community is responsible for introducing popular programming languages like Go, JavaScript and Rust, which make it easier for developers to create code and produce high-quality work at high speed. Without open source we would not have cloud services like AWS, GCP or Digital Ocean.

Open source acts as a force multiplier for projects. Applications can be built and delivered faster with the aid of community contributions. Developers can also customize their technology stacks, optimize productivity and experiment with and learn new techniques from other open source projects. With all of these capabilities, it’s no wonder that one of the main reasons companies adopt and embrace open source is to increase developer satisfaction.

In the world of remote work, when organizations skimp on developer collaboration (i.e., by asking engineers to use general collaboration tools for specialized, mission-critical functions), they can often end up in a downward spiral for tech talent.

As just one example, without actionable playbooks being integrated into workflows, incidents will likely continue to pull the wrong engineers into panicked conference calls. Processes and leadership won’t be clear. Half the time, incidents actually get worse as lack of context leads to the wrong actions being taken. Remediations can be slow and painful. Frustrated and exhausted, your best engineers will likely leave, taking their institutional knowledge with them. As the downward spiral accelerates, it will be harder than ever to backfill their roles, and your engineering managers will probably leave as well.

As your organization adopts more open source technology, your developers might encounter situations where they need to influence the technical direction of one or more open source technologies to better support your company. Open source software is built by a diverse group of community contributors, and it can sometimes be difficult to navigate the human complexities of these communities.

Having talented open source developers in the fold can enable your company to play an active role in the development of the technologies you rely on by being your representative within open source communities. This enables your developers to play a strategic role in the advancement of technology that’s vital to your company. With open source, everyone wins.

Ian Tien is Co-founder & CEO of Mattermost, the open-source messaging and collaboration platform with customers including Fastly, Samsung, Bosch, NASA, AIG, Wealthfront, and the US Air Force. The company has multiple open-source projects focused on collaboration and 34K+ stars across them all.

Mattermost has raised $70m from investors such as YC and Redpoint.

For developers and system engineers, Mattermost is an organizational team chat and messaging platform. Remote teams, Financial services, healthcare, and other industries benefit from it as well. With a little DevOps technical expertise, this platform can be customized with features like webhooks and custom slash commands.

When it comes to incident response, there are two levels of efficiency – how fast you can respond, and the utilization rate of assets used in responding. The more outages you have, the more resources you must divert from other value-creating initiatives. Every organization must forecast and budget for incident response and make the tradeoffs it deems suitable. For example, you can go light on load testing, but recognize you may need more resources to respond to increased outages later on. An integrated incident response platform allows you to do the data analysis necessary to make the best decisions in real time.

• Use open source group chat tools such as Mattermost or Rocket.chat to set up go-to-market (GTM) or product release channels for the sharing of product information if you haven’t already.
• Include sales and marketing in the build release cycle, allowing them to receive a demo or even use a test version.
• Give your sales and marketing teams access to documentation during the development cycle.

Today, secure collaboration platforms centralize communication across classified and non-classified networks and on military and non-military devices. Stakeholders get the information they need, when they need it, helping to keep people and property safe, and supporting a successful mission.

The U.S. Space Force’s approach to collaboration mirrors a trend among government organizations. Agencies that once used email and instant messaging for ad-hoc chat are now investing in a purpose-built collaboration platform.

The team realized a need for innovation and applied three tools from Platform 1 to their daily operations: Mattermost – a secure messaging application, Jira – a work management tool, and Confluence – a collaborative workspace allowing easy access to shared information.

With these three tools, the team was able to:

– Create Mattermost Day of Launch Channels which allows for secure, real-time updates on personal mobile devices.

– Create the Launch Verification Database which transitioned the National Security Space Launch risk assessment database to a cloud-based Jira solution.

– Create a SpaceX issue tracker with help from Silicon Mountain Technology (SMT), a software solution company contracted by the 5th SLS. This tracker automated issue ticket filtering and the process of uploading of data, which saved the team 120 man-hours per week.

Many cloud-driven enterprises are rethinking the way they approach security and development. To this end, a growing number of teams are transitioning from DevOps to DevSecOps and integrating Security into their development lifecycle.

Mattermost is an open source collaboration platform that combines chat, collaboration, project management, and automation to help developers organize their work and reduce context switching. This platform integrates with popular developer tools and can keep communication and collaboration flowing in DevSecOps teams.

Mattermost (mattermost/focalboard, 4K stars, 572% AGR). Collaboration platform (alternative to Slack). Founded in 2015 in Palo Alto and raised $70M from S28, Y Combinator, Redpoint, Battery Ventures, etc.

Focalboard by Mattermost is an open source, self-hosted project management tool that’s an alternative to Trello, Notion, and Asana.

Mattermost is a platform that enables collaboration throughout the software development life cycle.

It offers integrations with several other tools — such as GitHub, Jira, and PagerDuty — so that developers can collaborate without needing to switch between different applications.

It’s a combination of things, but open source technologies and projects have never been as popular as they are right now. Simply put, the best engineers are immersed in open source and thrive on contributing to, modifying and building open technologies that can be leveraged by their peers around the globe.

Mattermost is an open source collaboration tool for developers. It’s ideal for anyone needing customization or who is concerned about their teams’ and conversations’ privacy.

This means your team can download the app and host it on your own servers. When talking about sensitive topics like new apps, tools, and other developments, many developers don’t want to risk holding conversations on a third-party server.

Software moves fast; Kubernetes didn’t exist before 2014, but now 91 percent of teams surveyed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation leverage it in some way.  Open source software is the best solution to keep up with the rapid pace of change and to enable your engineering team to operate with optimal agility and flexibility.

With complete access to the source code, you’re able to fully customize its operation and tailor it to your specific needs. Interoperability and extensibility are the norm in open source software, enabling engineers to quickly-build high-impact software without wasting time reinventing the wheel. Proprietary solutions often come with more rigid, inflexible architectures, and open source is the remedy that enables you to craft solutions for any project.

What we do know is that teams with tailored collaboration patterns typically and materially outperformed their peers. Far more than video calls and calendars, developer collaboration is focused on thoughtfully integrating technical processes, workflows, and tools to maximize context and productivity, reducing unnecessary interruptions and ensuring alignment across the software development lifecycle.

The team’s conceptualization and strategic implementation of Mattermost significantly improved internal communications across the wing by providing a secure means to receive and share information at any time—without CAC access.

“It’s been a game changer in terms of our ability to share timely information and amplify messages across the wing,” said Ken Wright, 349th AMW public affairs chief. “Our members now have consistent access to the information they need from a personal device, including CUI, PII and HIPAA,” said Wright. “And they can access it from virtually anywhere, whenever it works best for them.”

Mattermost’s key differentiator is that it drives collaboration among DevOps teams to create a DevOps Command Center. This is aided by playbooks and templates with customizable workflows.

Ian Tien joins us to discuss Mattermost, an open-source, self-hostable online chat service with file sharing, search, and integrations.

Effective collaboration is crucial to ensuring that your agency can support operations in today’s hybrid work environment. This new workplace reality calls for new approaches to collaboration.

Ultimately, a unified collaboration platform dedicated to DevOps breaks down not only information and technology barriers but also the organizational silos that impede so many digital transformation efforts.

The answer lies in bringing those tools — and the people who use them — together under a central and unified interface. Much like an agency may monitor and control security threats from a single dashboard, organizations should create centralized hubs where developers can access an arsenal of DevOps tools.

Ian Tien, CEO of Mattermost, talks to Kellet Atkinson from DZone on digital operations and team collaboration trends at KubeCon 2021.

On October 13, 2021, Mattermost announced the launch of new project and workflow management solutions to help developers improve productivity and accelerate digital operations. In a new report from 451 Research, Industry Analyst Raul Castanon-Martinez highlights how the newly announced capabilities “mark an important milestone for the company” and our commitment to developer-centricity.

“Mattermost is eyeing a slice of Trello, Asana, and Notion’s pie as the open source ‘Slack alternative’ officially rolls out a new unified platform with integrated project and workflow management tools aimed at the software development fraternity.”

“Mattermost has long focused on enabling developer communication through its open-source messaging platform. Today, however, it has raised the stakes with the announcement of two new platform components.”

“Today, Mattermost is introducing a set of built-in alternatives to tools like Slack, Trello and Notion. The additions serve to improve the sprint, release management and incident resolution capabilities of developers. Highly needed, says Ian Tien, co-founder and CEO. ‘R&D teams tell us that 40 percent of the workweek is lost to tool fragmentation, manual tasks, fragile workflows and process failure.'”

“Here are four reasons why adopting open source technology can help organizations improve productivity, collaboration, and agility – while driving better technical and business outcomes without compromising security and control.”

“Some of our most popular, innovative features have been proposed or implemented by the community,” Tien said. “If Mattermost were an entirely proprietary product, we surely would have missed out some of the amazing ideas coming from our contributors.”

When you get the balance right, you have one group of users driving adoption of open source getting a lot of value – in our case developers wanting to collaborate more productively – with a second group with different priorities purchasing the commercial version–in our case managers and IT administrators in enterprises wanting sophisticated tools to control and administer their end user communities at scale, who are getting so much value from the offering.

“Smart organizations took notice of developer expertise and best practices and applied them across the enterprise from running effective remote meetings to onboarding new employees, and even how to create custom emojis.”

“Organizations that have implemented or extended DevOps processes and found new ways to collaborate are closer than their competitors to collaboration nirvana. How can others follow in their footsteps? “

“With a distributed team, it’s not uncommon for messages to be sent when people are offline. While organizations don’t need to implement a formal process for different time zones or offline message reception, it can help preface messages with ‘Not Urgent’ or other qualifiers if they know someone is likely to be offline.”

“’Mattermost is an app being utilized to replace other forms of communication such as email or workflow and was designed to help Airmen accomplish missions more efficiently,’ said Maj. Eric Robinson, 21st Airlift Squadron Phoenix Spark representative.”

“One of the important points to note here is that Mattermost Cloud is built to preserve privacy through a high-trust deployment option with dedicated single-tenant cloud infrastructure, enterprise-grade secure network topology, and strict data residency options.”

“Mattermost thus enables DevOps teams to collaborate throughout the incident lifecycle from triage and investigation, finally resolution and autopsy — involving the entire team and enabling whatever depth is needed for users to understand their roles to get the job done.”

“Mattermost Cloud is essentially a DevOps command center that provides single pane-of-glass pre-built workflows that address most common DevOps processes. IT teams can add their own custom workflows as their DevOps processes mature.”

“Mattermost Cloud enables developers to collaborate in a high-trust environment. The cloud platform offers a high-trust deployment option in a single-tenant, dedicated infrastructure including an isolated Kubernetes cluster, secure network topology with VPC peering, and strict data residency options across global regions.”

“Mattermost, a messaging app designed for businesses with serious privacy and security needs, announced a $50 million funding round on Wednesday, roughly four months after scooping up its first, Series A round of funding.”

“CEO Ian Tien says the series B proceeds will accelerate Mattermost’s community expansion and product development and fuel expansion of its workforce from 65 employees to 110 by 2020.”

“Mattermost provides an open-source messaging platform built to run on companies’ internal infrastructure. The service can be deployed in a public cloud such as Amazon Web Services or on on-premises hardware, behind the corporate firewall. That allows organizations to retain full control of employee communications and shield chat messages from prying eyes with the help of the existing security systems protecting their infrastructure.”

“Investor enthusiasm for all things messaging does not appear to be waning as CEO Ian Tien rolled his wheelbarrow of cash away from the offices of Y Combinator Continuity (YC), who led the $50m Series B investment.”

“Developers are adopting Mattermost because they want the extensibility of an open source platform to integrate with developer tools and automate portions of infrastructure operations.”

“Since its founding in 2015, Mattermost has witnessed steady growth, recently reaching the 10,000 server downloads per month milestone.”

“Mattermost has 10,000 downloads each month, adding up to a growing threat to Slack’s hegemony.”

“The messaging platform has proved popular with engineering teams, enamored by access to the code as well as the many, many add-ons published.”

Private, open source Slack competitor Mattermost today closed a $20 million funding round to help members of its community create new plugins and integrations.

“Since then, the software has notably been adopted by customers like Uber, which detailed in a blog post the adaptations it made to Mattermost to build its own, custom internal chat tool.”

“Workstream collaboration growth opportunities remain untapped due to typical nascent market barriers. To build and market WSC applications, technology product marketing leaders must demonstrate distinct value propositions for different customer types and decision makers.”

“For alternative self-hosted collaboration platforms, Mattermost is used by the US Department of Defense, Department of Interior, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and CERN.”

“In terms of monitoring and incident response, they are building shared tooling, based on Prometheus, Grafana and Mattermost (ChatOps). They facilitate postmortems by the product teams, and provide consulting on how to identify and fix reliability issues.”

“…Mattermost, an open source, private cloud-powered tool that is the complete opposite of Slack’s SaaS-only essence.”

“Uber used to use HipChat and Slack, and Uber mentioned that one of the advantages of building its own chat app off of Mattermost was that its “client user interfaces were similar to those of chat applications popular among Uber employees.”

“Omni says that the move to Mattermost has indeed helped their initial problems of keeping connected to their community.”

“Mattermost does open source the right way… designing and building a beautiful user experience, and backing it up with the awesomeness of open source.” Adam Hyde, Co-Founder of the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation

“Mattermost will feel like you scored the assigned seat beside your best friend.” – Charlie Reisinger, Penn Manor IT

“Mattermost is fun to use.” – Charlie Reisinger, Penn Manor IT

“…the tool you need to make your team’s communication more productive.”

“Slack alternative Mattermost… topped the Black Duck Rookies of the Year report, an annual list of new open source projects that attract the most developers and produce the most code.”

“…the best of both worlds”

“…for people and companies who want something different, their options are open.”

“…top new open source projects initiated in 2015.”

“…proprietary solutions face competition from open source alternatives which promise all the same features of the originals, but without the lock-in downside of proprietary solutions.”

“This year’s Rookies are impressive examples of how far open source has come, with start-ups like Mattermost and Glucosio as well as big players like Google, Facebook and Red Hat”

“Mattermost consolidates all team communication into one place, through an intuitive interface that is searchable and accessible anywhere.”

“…all the popular features of Slack.”

“Mattermost is [a] very modern approach to team chat.”

“It features private and public chats, including one on one communication, good archival support, and a very similar interface to Slack, including most of the features you’ve come to expect there.”

“…you can download it and run it on whatever server you want. …you’re in charge”

“We found Mattermost to be the leading open source Slack-alternative…”