E122: How Orkes is Building a Great Company on Conductor
Jan 24, 2024
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Jeu George, Co-Founder & CEO of Orkes, talks about the Conductor project journey, challenges of deploying microservices, utilizing customer feedback for product roadmap, developer playground and content strategy, exploring use cases and competitors, and importance of targeting developers in an open-source project.
Conductor, an orchestration engine based on the project developed at Netflix, gained traction within companies like Tesla and JP Morgan, showing its potential in coordinating and managing microservices in a cloud-based environment.
Orca's, the company built around Conductor, prioritizes feedback from the open-source community and combines it with industry trends to continuously improve the orchestration engine and meet the needs of developers and enterprises across industries.
Orca's educates users about different workflow orchestration solutions, emphasizing the strengths and weaknesses of Conductor compared to other tools, and provides resources to help developers easily adopt and leverage Conductor's powerful orchestration capabilities.
Deep dives
Building Orca's: The Inception of Conductor
Orca's, an orchestration engine based on the conductor project, was founded by former Netflix employees who were inspired by the need to quickly create and experiment with new types of content. Originally developed at Netflix, Conductor aimed to solve the challenges of coordinating and managing microservices in a rapidly scaling cloud-based environment. With its language-agnostic and deployment-agnostic design, Conductor gained traction within Netflix and quickly spread to other companies, including Tesla, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and more. The founders of Orca's recognized the growing demand for an open-source orchestration solution and decided to build a company around Conductor to meet the needs of developers and enterprises across various industries. They value feedback from the open-source community and prioritize features that provide value to developers, while also offering enterprise-level capabilities and support for specific use cases like payment processing and vendor onboarding. The team aims to continuously improve Conductor by actively engaging with the community and understanding market trends.
Maintaining an Open-Source Project: Challenges and Strategies
Maintaining an open-source project like Conductor comes with its own set of challenges. The team at Orca's must carefully balance the needs of the community with the evolving requirements of enterprise customers. They prioritize feedback from both the open-source community and their enterprise clients, ensuring that new features and enhancements align with the needs of developers. Additionally, they combine their own insights with industry trends, considering where the market is moving and what problems need to be addressed. While maintaining an open-source project can be complex, Orca's places a strong emphasis on transparency, communication, and guiding principles to determine what goes into open source and what stays within the enterprise offering. They strive to make Conductor a user-friendly solution and actively listen to feedback and feature requests from the community to shape the roadmap and drive ongoing development.
Content Strategy: Educating and Guiding Users
Orca's employs a content strategy that focuses on educating and guiding users who are exploring various workflow orchestration solutions. Their blog posts aim to help users understand the strengths and weaknesses of different tools, such as Conductor, Cadence, and Airflow, allowing them to make informed decisions. The team provides comparisons and use cases to showcase how Conductor differs from other solutions and highlights its capabilities in areas like scaling, operational management, and language flexibility. They also produce developer-oriented content, including tutorials and examples, to help users get started with Conductor and showcase its value in common use cases like subscription flows. By providing educational resources and addressing user concerns, Orca's aims to build awareness and attract users who can benefit from Conductor's powerful orchestration capabilities.
Prioritizing the Developer Experience
Orca's prioritizes the developer experience and continuously seeks feedback from the community and enterprise customers. They focus on understanding the needs and pain points of developers, aiming to simplify the use of Conductor and provide features that developers find valuable. Whether it's through the user-friendly UI or the ability to write code in different languages, Orca's ensures that the developer perspective is central to the development and improvement of Conductor. They actively engage with the open-source community through channels like office hours and Slack, and leverage customer feedback from both the community and enterprise users to drive the product roadmap. By keeping developers in mind and constantly refining Conductor based on their needs and feedback, Orca's strives to make Conductor a tool of choice for developers building and managing complex workflow orchestration systems.
Lessons Learned in the Open-Source Space
Orca's journey in the open-source space has taught them the importance of maintaining relentless focus on the target user, which for them is the developer. They emphasize understanding the needs of developers and consistently delivering value through open-source contributions. They encourage listening to the community, gathering feedback, and ensuring that every feature aligns with the developer persona. Furthermore, they stress the significance of remaining aware of industry trends and balancing customer feedback with the team's own insights. In addition, they highlight the challenges of maintaining an open-source project, including managing contributions, ensuring compliance with open-source licenses, and prioritizing what goes into open source versus enterprise offerings. By staying true to their core user and incorporating these lessons, Orca's aims to continue driving the adoption and success of Conductor.
Jeu George is Co-Founder & CEO of Orkes, the orchestration engine based on the Conductor project. Conductor was originally created at Netflix but they have since discontinued support of the project. The team at Orkes has forked the project and is building a company around it.
In this episode, we talk through the Conductor journey - from creating the original project at Netflix to forking the project, why an orchestration engine is critical to companies building with microservices, signs that there was company potential behind the project (aspirational companies using it, production workloads, etc.) & more!
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