We are pleased to welcome Bill Mulligan to talk to us about pick-by-project, lessons learned
from interviewing and writing 20 plus end user case studies. Bill Mulligan is a cloud native
pollinator, community builder, and maintainer for psyllium and EBPF.io. He has given talks,
written articles, and appeared on podcasts on a wide range of topics around cloud native
and open source. While at the CNCF, he restarted the Kubernetes community day program,
and he is currently at Isovalent growing the psyllium and EBPF communities.
Welcome, Bill.
Okay, great. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, so pick my project, right? We're all here in open source. We love to have our projects
adopted, and we're here in the community room to talk about how we can have adoption
of open source projects. So I'm actually going to talk, start my talk with a little live demo,
which may be a little bit on common in the community room.
So I'm going to try it out. So obviously, as you know, like main place for social coding,
get hub, and what's the way to create a community on GitHub?
Well, I think the main way people do it is by like going over here to the top right corner
on the fost-down website and clicking the star button, right? We're part of the community now,
and it's growing. This is adoption. Okay, maybe not. It's a little bit of a vanity metric.
You know, and I'm a maintainer of the psyllium projects, bar vanity metric.
We just passed the 20K GitHub stars, but this isn't what I'm talking about, right?
I think all of us in this room know that this isn't what community is.
It's not going on the website and like clicking the little star button.
What community actually is people putting it into production.
So what I'm actually a lot more proud about on the psyllium project is we have 150 public users saying,
like, hey, I'm using psyllium. I love it. Like, this is what I'm using it for.
And 75 of those have written case studies or given talks or written blog posts about how they're actually using the project.
Right? That's what real adoption is. That's what we're all trying to do in open source,
to have people actually using our project and benefiting from it.
But the question that I'm trying to answer in this talk exactly is what is causing all of these end users to actually adopt a cloud native project or an open source project.
Because there's lots of different options, right?
Any solution has lots of different options that we can choose.
And so if we went back to that, if we went back on GitHub, we get to the first thing is the read meat.
This is where a lot of projects talk about what it can do for you.
So on psyllium, I'm going to make fun of our own project.
We talk about almost unlimited scale, deep network monitoring, visibility, highly efficient and flexible.
Right? These are a lot of marketing buzzwords too.
And that's not actually why people are picking either. This is like the high level overview.
So what is it to actually make somebody go from clicking that star to actually downloading your project
and using it? If you take nothing else away from this talk, this is what I want you to know.
A specific end user need and our challenge is what's actually driving the adoption.
When there's a challenge they're trying to overcome in either their personal life, in their company, in their business,
that's what's going to make them download and use their project.
So I'm going to start this talk kind of in two halves.
I'm going to talk about how I've seen that play out in the psyllium project for my own personal experience.
And then I'm going to talk about how you can do that with your own project if you want to grow your community too.
So the lens that I'm going to use for this talk is through case studies.
Now I think case studies are a great way to kind of summarize this whole user journey from clicking the GitHub star all the way to using it in production.
And psyllium has 24 different CNCF case studies that I've helped written.
And I really like them because they have kind of a standardized format to them.
First, there's the challenge, right? This is the end user need that I was talking about that the company or the person is trying to solve.
The second part is the solution. This is where your project comes in.
And the last part is the impact because the impact is really why they're choosing it, right?
They're trying to solve a challenge and the impact is what they're able to do afterwards.
So going through all these 24 different case studies, there's a few top things I've seen people and why they choose the psyllium project.
Number one is performance and scalability.
The second one is network policy. The third one is simplifying their stack.
So service, encryption, observability, multi-cluster and a rich feature set.
So if you're not involved in infrastructure software or don't really care about cloud native, you can kind of tune out for this next section.
But I think you should take away the quotes so you can understand a little bit about how people are thinking about adopting open source projects.
So the first one around performance and scalability.
So Trendall is an e-commerce company based in Turkey, right? It's all about performance for the consumers.
So when people put things in the shopping cart, they can check out right away.
Right? And as they were scaling quickly, they weren't able to keep up with the traffic that they're having.
And so they looked at psyllium because they needed to improve the performance and scalability of their clusters to meet their cost number demand.
Right? And when they switched, they found that they actually had a 40% increase in performance, allowing their customers to check out faster.
Right? So the challenge was, is that they couldn't keep up with customer demand.
Silly, I'm to help them have a more scalable performance network.
And the impact is that they had a better experience for their customers and helped them check out faster.
Right? And that's kind of the lens of how people adopt open source project.
There's a challenge. Your project needs to come in with a solution to that specific challenge.
And then it needs that an actual impact on the business bottom line. So let's run through a few more of these.
Sysnam is a kind of long-crucing website of the Czech Republic.
They were also having problems with performance and scalability.
When they switched to psyllium, they were able to save 72 times the CPU.
Right? And that saved them a lot of money. They were able to reduce the number of servers that they had in their data center.
Right? Great for the business bottom line, the impact that they had.
The next one comes from Bloomberg around network policy.
And so, right? Financial data, they really need to make sure that it's secure.
With Silly, I'm there able to lock down their clusters with host-based policies.
And what that allowed them to do is offer additional features to their customers.
So it wasn't about just keeping their customers data safe, right?
Very important for financial services company, but also adding more value to their customers too.
So it wasn't just an impact today, but it also enabled their business going forward into the future too.
Sysselven is a cloud provider based out of Berlin where I live.
And what Silly allowed them to do is simplify their stack.
Right? As a managed service provider, they're trying to integrate all these different components for their customers.
And every single piece of complexity is more overhead that they need to manage for their customer.
And so what Silly, I'm able to do is rather than having four or five different pieces of software that they're managing to meet their end customers need,
they're just able to have one piece of software, right?
So simplifying the stack and managed service is all about being able to provide software or service efficiently to your customer.
So Silly, I was helping it them making it easier to manage their stack, right?
And this really made them choose, like if we can do something with Silly and versus something else, then we're going to choose to do it with Silly.
Like once you're in there, you're also able to solve additional challenges for your adopters too.
Rubber bank, also here in Europe, they were looking for self service.
I think a lot of people, if you're in platform engineering or something like that, you know, there's a very small team supporting hundreds or even thousands of developers.
And this is exactly the problem that they were having too.
So they had a small team trying to support over 400 teams, right?
And so Silly amount allowed them to automate a lot of their processes so that they didn't need to do all the maintenance on their team, right?
So it saved them a lot of time and allowed them to focus on other business challenges that they had too.
A send.io is a data company based in California and they're really worried about encryption, right?
They need to keep their customer data secure.
And so with Silly, I'm there able to move encryption into the network layer and make that responsible for it.
And rather than having to make some of their data jobs failed, because encryption was through there, moving into the network later,
the layer helped them make it responsible for that.
On observability, trying to have deep observability into the infrastructure, this is from WSO2,
and they were trying to provide a view to their customers, right?
The customers wanted to know what was going wrong in their infrastructure, how can we kind of like solve the challenges in terms of like errors or latency or different HTTP status codes,
and what Silly and allow them to do is to provide that observability to their customers, right?
So their customers were asking for something and Silly was able to provide it.
Not only did this meet their customers ask, they were actually able to optimize the network traffic of that.
And it allows customers to find out their issues and resolve them, right?
This self-service thing, reducing the demands on the actual business.
Security is a bank based on a Brazil, and data problem with multi-cluster management.
We have this massive IT estate.
How can we possibly provide a consistent networking experience as we're going across multiple cloud providers?
And this was critical for the business strategy going forward.
They wanted to have a multi-club strategy, but they still needed to deliver all of that in a manageable way.
So Silly, like multi-cluster management, came in to allow them to have a consistent networking experience wherever they needed to go.
And this is actually recognized recently by this CNCF technology radar.
So Silly was the most useful and the most mature solution for multi-cluster management based on all the end users, right?
So meeting the challenges that the businesses have today.
But Meltwater was next one, is they were trying to have a richer feature set that they could offer to their customers.
And with Silly, they're able to have more features there too.
And so I kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier, right?
You have the initial challenge, how your project comes in, and the impact that it has on the business.
But once your project is actually installed in there, you want to give them a path forward's a way to continue to believe in your project.
It's not just about today, but it's about tomorrow too, like solving the future challenges, right?
So that's kind of like the simplifying the stock.
You want to be able to set people up for the future too, because they want to believe in your project, not like,
Oh, it's going to be another piece of software that I have to install, upgrade, maintain, but it'll help enable me going forward too.
And then once you kind of have that technical impact, you want to be able to make sure that you can tie this back to an actual business outcome too.
Because that's at the end of the day, once you move outside the technical team, people are going to ask,
Hey, why do we have this piece of software?
Couldn't we do this easier simpler, whatever else?
And being able to explain that in business terms to the actual bottom line is important too.
So one example is around debugging, right?
Going from hours of engineering time to seconds of engineering time, that makes it a lot less expensive,
and you can explain that to the CEO, look at how many person hours that we're saving with this.
Or another example is customers are asking for more sophisticated features,
and with Williams features, we're able to acquire more customers, right?
So increasing revenue there, so either saving cost or increasing revenue.
And the last one is around being able to like change the customer's perception of you.
Being more bought into you, because for example, your performance is much better.
Being able to deliver better experience will make the customers return to you too.
So that's like a high level overview of all the different, some of the different case studies that I've done for Silium.
But I think this room is like probably more interested in how do we actually like create these case studies?
How do we say what your project is doing and encourage other people to adopt your project too?
So now I'm going to walk you through my framework of creating these case studies that kind of like draw out this end user experience.
So if there's a process that I've used a lot from the CNCF, I like to hear too.
So there's the initial proposal.
We do review like creation, editing and publishing.
But let's kind of walk that through step by step.
So the first part is reaching out to different companies.
And I think this is what a lot of things that a lot of open source projects miss is where you're already actually providing value to people.
If they're using your software, they're getting some type of value out of it, right?
And so you can ask for some of that value back in return.
And people are always afraid about like, hey, I don't know.
Like I'm scared of asking people, but like what I've found in my experience, if people are already happy, then they're happy to help you out too.
You know, it's like a two way street.
I think that's one of the cool things about open source too.
So you can see some examples from here in the Selium project.
In our issue template, we ask people if they would like to add themselves to the user doc, right?
So if people are using software, they encounter an issue, then that's a great way you already know they're using the software.
Or on social media, people are like, oh, wow, look at this great thing I'm doing with Selium.
I'm going to be like, hey, would you mind adding yourself to the user doc?
And then I asked them after that.
They'd like to do a case study about it.
Other examples is if you're on an event, like for example, foster them, you see here somebody talking about your software,
then reach out to them.
This is like the schedule from Selium and EDPF day.
I reached out to all these people and asked them if they want to do a case study.
We also do an annual survey, also ask people there, right?
So just be open to asking people, hey, can I have a little bit of the value that I've given you back in return?
I think most people are open to it.
Now once the person says yes, there's a set of, you should set up an interview with them.
And this takes like the same structure as the case study too.
So the first thing is the challenge was your company do.
If it's e-commerce, you know, they're trying to help people check out faster.
If they're trying to be a bank, they're trying to secure your data.
What does your company do?
What is your current IT infrastructure and team look like?
Is it a couple people supporting a lot of people?
Are you trying to observe exactly what's going on in your network?
And what's the challenge that you're having?
Like, what caused you to do this?
Was it like the surging traffic?
Was your multi-cluster strategy?
Was it the encryption that you needed to secure your customer data?
What was the actual thing that caused you to look for something different, right?
Because that's what's going to drive people to adopt an open source project.
The next part is around the solution.
Now that you know you needed something, what were you actually looking for in that solution?
Right?
And this is, I think this is actually the key question is you're going through these case studies.
It's understand about your project.
Because when people are looking for something, it tells you exactly why people would consider your project
and is going to drive further adoption of it.
So I think as you're going through this process, understand what people are actually looking for.
And then what made Seliam or your project, the best choice, what are the solutions that you look at?
Right?
So it gives you a kind of overview of the landscape of different solutions that people are looking at.
I think it's always interesting for me, like what are people actually comparing Seliam to?
And I've heard of wide range of different answers, right?
Because every company's infrastructure is a little bit different.
And the exact challenge that they're trying to solve, there's many ways to do it.
And then on the implementation side, what did this system actually look like?
How did it actually come in and where did it integrate into the rest there?
Like IT infrastructure story and how did they implement the solution?
And then once you have the solution, going to the impact, right?
I think the last part was about understanding the process of how people adopt your software.
And this last part on the impact is talking about how you actually are going to prove that value to other people to encourage them to adopt.
So what's the value that the solution now provides?
How did it change your situation for the better?
And this is actually my favorite question.
What was the outcome for your business?
I think a lot of people don't like to talk about the money, but this is what actually encourages people to demonstrate like to the rest of the company, not just in engineering, whatever else.
What's the business impact on the bottom line?
I think that's one of my favorite questions asked to.
Then finally, what are you playing on doing in the future?
Are they going to continue to grow with your project?
Because it can help direct the future roadmap of the project, too.
A couple tips that I'd have to, one, if you're doing an interview, make sure you record it.
That way you can re-listen to it, pull direct quotes.
I think the quotes are really what helps make these case studies come alive, at least to me.
All the things that you saw in the previous slide were quotes that I have from the case studies.
Use other sources of information, so if they've done a blog, video, a talk, different posts, pull that in too.
And then I think the last part, I think if you're creating a story, think about like a puzzle, right?
You have this set of interview questions, but there's all these different pieces.
It doesn't have to be following through exactly as an interview.
You can be like, oh, this piece is here, this piece is here, let's move these around.
I think that's the fun part about creating the stories, like, a little puzzle that you have to put together.
So then once you actually have it published, it's not just just posted on your website.
You just also promote it and leverage it, too.
So what I do in our project, we make posts on social media, we add it to our newsletter, so people can see it there.
Or think about the other avenues that you have it, maybe you have a Slack channel or other type of chat channel, right?
How can you promote these to the channels that your project has, too?
Because people are calling your projects if they like it.
And then my second live demo in the community room is showing how we actually do this on the silly project, too.
So this is what I was talking about earlier.
We actually have an adopters page, right?
And we say, like, hey, look, these are all the people that have said that they do it.
And if you want to learn, okay, how does eBay use silly them?
Well, you can watch the talk right here.
So people would be like, oh, wow, there's these other companies using my project, using this project, too.
Maybe I should look at it.
And we have this whole page to kind of highlight, look, here's all these people that are using the project.
This is a great way to have a social proof about people actually using your project, right?
But maybe not everybody's going to click into the, like, users page.
They don't really care about that.
So as we're kind of like going through the homepage, you can see we integrated that here.
Once again, the social proof people are using our project.
But then if you go back to what I said at the beginning, people are trying to solve the specific challenge.
So what we did is we actually took these use cases, or we took these case studies and repackaged them into different case studies.
So what people may actually be looking for, they're not looking for, like, oh, I want to silly them, right?
They're going to be like, oh, I need high performance, not working solution.
I need a layer for a load balancer.
Or whatever your project is, you know, trying to solve.
And so, for example, if I click into this layer for a load balancer page, you can see we pulled out different talks.
And then at the bottom here, we've integrated those companies case studies into this.
Once again, showing, like, okay, I am looking for a layer for a load balancer, for example.
One of the companies are using it and what benefits did they see, right?
So once again, like, proving it out and showing that other people have benefited from this too.
And it's not just about, like, this specific challenge.
You can also do things like industries, right?
Different types of industries that are adopting your software are also going to have challenges specific to them too.
So, for example, in financial services, they're going to care a lot about regulation and oversight, compliance, security, right?
And so, speak to those things.
And then you can pull out quotes from those case studies and be like, hey, this is how people in the financial services are benefiting from the software too.
Right?
And then once again, we also provide direct links to those case studies on this page too.
So, if somebody says, like, you know, I'm doing networking in the financial services industry, how do people actually benefit from this?
Well, there's a whole page for them and they can see how other companies benefited too.
So, end of demo too.
So, just to kind of summarize that on the website, add an adopters page, add quotes to the homepage, have that social proof, right?
These case studies are really good things that you should highlight them and use them too.
Once you actually have a couple of case studies written up, you don't even need that many.
Like, start to create use cases pages, right?
From that story is like, like, that's the question I was talking about.
Like, what were you looking for in a solution?
Right?
That's the use cases that you're actually solving you.
The end users are giving you the answer to the questions.
Like, what is your project actually doing in the ecosystem?
Right?
So, you create something like use cases page and be like, here are the specific problems that we're solving.
And then the last part is you can also solve industry vertical pages, right?
So, think about the common industries that are adopting a project like financial services or medium entertainment or telecommunications or whatever else you're doing.
And then you can discuss the common challenges and show how companies are solving those today.
So, in summary, right?
People choose an open source project or really any type of technology because they need to solve an immediate challenge or need.
Right?
A lot of people like to, oh, there's this green field project, but no, like, businesses are trying to solve immediate challenges.
Whether that's, we need better performance for our clusters.
We need to be able to network across multiple clouds.
So, be really clear what is your project the best that?
What use cases are you solving?
And take that information from the case studies and also tell it back being like, this is what our project does.
And this is how other people have used our project to solve that specific challenge.
Make that super clear to your users.
And then, for the case studies, like, don't be afraid, right?
The open source users have already benefited from your project.
They're getting some value out of it.
Don't be afraid to ask for some of that value back.
Once again, that's what I love about open source is that we're all working and trying to benefit and do this together.
And then the last part is really focus on the business outcome and, like, the setup for the future.
Because it's not about just, oh, we saw this technical challenge.
Right? You need to communicate it to everybody else too.
So, we reduced cost. We increased revenue.
You know, we made us more attractive to potential customers.
Because that's ultimately what's going to speak to the rest of the business.
And make sure that your project is seen as a key part of the business going forward.
So, with that, thank you.