Relaunching an Open Source Software Community at Kubecon
RESULTS
1 of 1
On-time Launch
3
Sites Unified
12
Weeks to Launch
1
award Winning Site
COLAB partnered with K8ssandra to redesign their website and enhance community interaction, culminating in a successful relaunch at KubeCon.
Focus
Challenge
K8ssandra is an open-source project that packages everything needed to run Apache Cassandra® on Kubernetes. While the software was powerful, its website wasn’t pulling its weight. It lacked personality, felt disjointed, and didn’t do much to encourage participation or community growth. Compared to other open-source projects, K8ssandra’s site fell short on storytelling, usability, and tools that would help developers engage more deeply with the platform.
Solution
COLAB partnered with the K8ssandra team to relaunch their site ahead of a major presence at KubeCon. We redesigned the website with a fresh brand identity, built a community forum integration, created a themed documentation experience to align with the new look and feel, and developed a custom Vue.js app that helps users generate configuration files without digging through YAML. The result was a more cohesive, contributor-friendly platform that invites exploration and participation.
Background
Despite being an excellent tool for Apache Cassandra database administrators, the K8ssandra community was less active than many other open-source projects. The team at K8ssandra wanted to inject new life into the brand, starting with a redesign to build the foundation for a more valuable web experience.
Solutions
We worked with the fantastic team at K8ssandra to redesign the website using updated brand standards. We integrated a new Discourse forum to promote community member engagement. This tool would allow contributors, users, and their community manager to discuss and debate the project. Their documentation site followed suit to the forum and was themed to align with the primary website.
Outcomes
The team was thrilled with our redesign. The website was relaunched to the public at Kubecon, a big event for Kubernetes (a tool for deploying infrastructure), where it made a big splash. We’re so pleased to have supported this very cool software project.
Update
Following the major announcement at Kubecon, we created the K8ssandra Config Builder, a web app that allows you to generate a configuration file that is ready for use!
