Getting rigorous about investing in the Kubestack project
Published: 2022-11-27 14:52:30

Sometimes when you spend a long time solving a problem, it makes it harder to see your solution clearly.

In 12 years helping companies adopt modern cloud computing, I saw so many of the same snags repeating across multiple organizations. From these lessons, I built Kubestack as guardrails to make it easier to avoid the pain in the first place. Kubestack has been used in companies large and small for years, but I haven’t always known where it has been most helpful to its users. Without knowing this, it’s hard to bring more people in as both users and contributors. So earlier this year, I contracted with [Ana Hevesi](https://www.anahevesi.com/) to support Kubestack's open source efforts.

Ana operates a developer experience consultancy. After working in technical community building for companies like Stack Overflow and Nodejitsu, Ana now works with devtools founders to create evidence-based approaches for growing their ecosystems.

We started by doing some research into how Kubestack serves your goals.

## Research methods

Our objective was to learn about users’ career trajectories and aspirations, and get a clear picture of what role Kubestack plays in your success.

Ana recommended we aim for 5 interviews, citing it as a good “goldilocks zone” for initial quantity of data to work with. I then reached out to a spectrum of new and long-tenured Kubestack users to ask for their time in a 60 minute user interview.

Ana wrote a standard interview script which included bandwidth for conversational “side quests.” After, Ana analyzed recordings, picked out repeat themes, and came to me with conclusions and recommendations.

## Areas of positive impact

### Kubestack helps careers

Participants attributed their use of Kubestack to positive career outcomes, such as developing a reputation for reliably delivering for users, or scaling on a tight timeframe with limited prior experience. Others reported it was a key learning tool when they were just starting as platform engineers.

### Works so well it disappears

The most consistent feedback we received was that users can assume Kubestack is just going to work. Multiple participants had been relying on the framework for many months without needing to give it a second thought.

## Areas to improve

### Documentation for advanced features needs improvement

Kubestack works great for months on end for most orgs setting up their first K8s cluster, but those who wished to modify Kubestack outside of existing use cases told us error messages and upgrade processes were opaque.

### Backwards compatibility and multi-cloud support presents friction to open source contributions

Adding new features requires working knowledge of both Terraform and cloud provider functionality across historical versions, and at times, their interactions with one another. Furthermore, while Kubestack is committed to supporting EKS, AKS, and GKE, a contributor may wish to implement functionality for only one of these cloud providers. Inviting more PRs from a wider array of contributors necessitates a plan for tiered support of legacy versions or defining contributor scope to accommodate this complexity.

## How we’re applying these findings

### Connecting with the people who need us most

Kubestack makes a huge impact on early-stage teams and emerging professionals. We’re exploring ways to better tailor our communication and outreach to make sure they know about the opportunities this framework provides, improving both adoption and contributions to the project. Kubestack only succeeds because you succeed.

### Benefits before features

The current iteration of Kubestack’s landing page assumes a fairly high level of existing knowledge of the platform engineering space. As such, an upcoming iteration of the Kubestack site will aim to engage folks who aren’t already deep in the jargon and progressively bring them into the fold, while still being legible to seasoned professionals.

### Open source participation onramps

Since enabling users to learn from each other and communicating where the project is going is an important part of growing an open source community, we’ll be experimenting with office hours and public communication about recent releases. We’ll have scheduling details coming soon.

## Leveling up, together

I created Kubestack so that folks coming to Kubernetes for the first time could take immediate advantage of the separation of concerns that containers provide. User research says that this works as intended!

Now comes the iterative task of communicating my own knowledge and experience in ways that make it easier to build together, while learning from your use of the project to fill in its gaps. Ultimately, the intent is a healthy community where we’re all working together to make the project better serve your needs.

Finally, a big thank you to Tomas, AJ, Brendan, Christoph, and Mark for your time and candor. Kubestack is better for it.