Learnings from building the Envoy proxy community.

1. Envoy: An End User Driven Open
Source Success Story
Matt Klein: @mattklein123

2. What is Envoy?
The network should be transparent to applications.
When network and application problems do occur,
it should be easy to determine the source of the problem.

3. Who am I?
● ~20 years of operating systems, virtualization, distributed
systems, and networking across many companies
● Primarily closed source software development - minimal
OSS experience prior to Envoy
● Envoy: winning the OSS lottery on the first
shot!
● Lots of learning about OSS along the way...

4. Let’s do some OSS!
We'll get together, have a few laughs, and do some OSS...

5. History
2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

6. Envoy adoption

7. Why has Envoy become popular?
● Performance
● Reliability
● Modern codebase
● Extensibility
● Best-in-class operability
● Configuration API
● Community

8. Why are we doing OSS? Let’s be honest
● Everyone involved has different
motivations - let’s be honest about
them from the start to avoid heartache
later
● Doing OSS well is no different from
starting a company, and doing it poorly
can be a net negative on your org
● Assuming “winning” is the goal,
non-tech factors weigh very
heavily

9. Be nice
● No really
● I mean it
● There is no single thing that
has a bigger impact on
community growth
● GitHub interactions, mailing
lists, encouraging new
contributors and maintainers,
etc.

10. Website and documentation
● This is the first thing
potential users will see
● Do not underestimate “first
impression” impact,
regardless of underlying
tech
● Logo, grammar, spelling,
polish, examples,
comparison to similar
systems, etc.

11. Do things in the open
● Seems obvious, yet is ignored time and
time again
● Track issues/proposals in public
● Fix issues and build features in public
● Run all tests in public
● Do not “reverse merge” from private to
public

12. PR / marketing
● It’s easy to make fun of Twitter,
but it matters
● Same for blogs
● Same for meetups and
conferences
● These are methods that build
buzz, and the effects amplify
over time

13. Envoy business model (or lack thereof)
● No premium version
● Technology first decisions
● Build an ecosystem that allows
differentiated success on top
● But: funding can be
complicated
● But: management can be
complicated

14. Managing burnout and expectations
● A very successful OSS project
Is no different from an early
stage startup that blows up
● Scaling contributors and
maintainers only way to survive
(see: being nice)
● Maintainer burnout is a real problem in modern OSS with
no easy answers (especially in the face of conflicting
expectations with employers)

15. Why Envoy + Q&A
● Quality + velocity + operability
● Extensibility
● API driven
● No “open core” / paid premium version. It’s all there
● Community, community, community