Fueling innovative software
July 15-18, 2019
Portland, OR

Envoy: An end-user-driven open source success story

Matt Klein (Lyft)
11:00am11:40am Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Secondary topics:  Customer Centered
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)

Who is this presentation for?

  • OSS engineers and program personnel (business, marketing, etc.)

Level

Non-technical

Description

Envoy, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation-graduated project, was released in 2016, and in just two years has become one of the most popular and fastest-growing OSS projects in the cloud native space. If you’re looking for a case study on a very successful outcome, maintaining an OSS project and looking for tips and potential pitfalls, interested in learning about an end user or community-first project success story instead of a vendor-driven one, or interested in a discussion of OSS funding and business models, this is for you.

Matt Klein explores how Envoy has been able to achieve such incredible traction in a short period of time, focusing on community growth; critical building blocks such as documentation, PR, and marketing; governance; funding; and the business model (or lack thereof, as Envoy has no single corporate entity behind it). He reflects on his personal history (investor interest, nearing burnout, etc.), saving plenty of time for discussion. You’ll leave with a general understanding of the complexities and realities of growing a popular end-user-driven OSS project in the era of cloud vendors, VC-backed startups, “big money,” and entrenched competition.

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Familiarity with OSS, including recent discussions regarding its business models and licenses (useful but not required)

What you'll learn

  • Understand what Envoy is and why it's been successful
Photo of Matt Klein

Matt Klein

Lyft

Matt Klein is a software engineer at Lyft and the creator of Envoy. He’s been working on operating systems, virtualization, distributed systems, networking, and making systems easy to operate for nearly 20 years across a variety of companies. Some highlights include leading the development of Twitter’s L7 edge proxy and working on high-performance computing and networking in Amazon’s EC2.