Diagrid and Dapr: How to Balance Open Source and Business Through Data
Diagrid was founded in 2022 by the creators of the popular Dapr open source project with the mission to boost developer productivity, particularly those developers focused on cloud native and microservice architectures. Diagrid provides developers with productive tools and APIs, so they can concentrate on what matters: their business.
About Diagrid
Diagrid was founded in 2022 by the creators of the popular Dapr open source project with the mission to boost developer productivity, particularly those developers focused on cloud native and microservice architectures. Diagrid provides developers with productive tools and APIs, so they can concentrate on what matters: their business.
“We’re very much a developer application-centric company. In particular, we focus on open source technologies like Dapr, which is a distributed application runtime,” said Mark Fussell, CEO and founder of Diagrid, co-creator of Dapr.
Challenge
In 2021, the Dapr project creators donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it became an incubation project. Making data-driven decisions for a commercial company built on an open source project that had no real concrete data, was a real challenge.
“Dapr is open source; historically, it’s been very hard to see what’s happening inside the project because of pushback about using certain types of commercial tracking,” said Mark.
“We were flying blind,” Yaron Schneider, CTO and founder of Diagrid, co-creator of Dapr, added.
Solution
The Diagrid founders, as maintainers of Dapr in the CNCF, tested Scarf and brought the results to the Steering and Technical Committee (STC). Because of the high quality of the data provided, the privacy guarantees of the platform, and the fact that Scarf is an approved partner of the CNCF, the STC agreed to add Scarf to the Dapr project.
“We use Scarf to create a pipeline that has become a major driving force for revenue,” said Yaron. “It really helps us see market opportunities by showing us which Dapr users to reach out to“, concluded Mark.
The setup
The Diagrid founders wear two hats, as co-creators of the open source project and active members of that community, and as business founders trying to grow their company. They came up with a way to use Scarf to benefit them both. Dapr measures only views of the project documentation; from this they then extrapolate information about the project based on that.
Result
Diagrid, as maintainers of Dapr, are able to translate data from Scarf into transformational GTM intelligence. By learning about which organizations are reading which docs pages, Diagrid can better target their marketing and sales efforts. The Dapr community is able to use that data to identify what docs people are using most frequently, thereby spending more resources on developing those tools/resources which improves the overall open source experience.
“Given that it’s open to everyone who is a maintainer of Dapr, we can all go and look at the data and take advantage of it,” said Mark Fussell.
Key outcomes
- Better understanding of the project usage
- Data-driven improvements to the open source experience
- Valuable insights into Dapr project documentation usage without compromising user privacy
- Diagrid translated user data into valuable insights for marketing and product development of their commercial product
- Approval of Scarf usage in a popular CNCF project
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