Upstream First: Building Databases, AI , Communities, and Trust

Why would a cloud provider pay engineers to work on software it gives away? Millions of customers run open source databases on AWS, and when they hit problems, the most durable fix is upstream, for everyone. Sustaining that requires more than patches: it means healthy code and healthy communities, over decades rather than release cycles. In this talk, Casper Coertze shares how AWS puts that principle into practice across the database ecosystem: dedicated upstream contributor teams for PostgreSQL, deep investment in Valkey and MySQL, security research contributed back to the community, and the recent welcome of Amsterdam’s own DuckLabs team. He will also touch on the foundations everything runs on, from Linux kernel contributions and the open sourcing of Bottlerocket and Firecracker to OpenSearch’s move to vendor-neutral governance and a joint Linux Foundation investment in defending open source from AI-generated vulnerability reports.