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Messaging Guide

Why You Should Talk about StarlingX, and How

StarlingX is an open source project and community, and it benefits from marketing activities the same way as any commercial project. It is a common mistake that people only talk about open source projects in the context of a commercial offering, and therefore not all projects get visibility on their own merit. Don’t make this mistake yourself!

This documentation is intended to provide guidance on messaging and marketing strategies, do’s and don'ts as well as a few sample posts that you can use whether you are a contributor or user of StarlingX, or a vendor who has products or services built around the platform.

First, you need to remember and keep the project’s mission statement in mind: “Empower organizations to deploy and manage high-performance, distributed cloud infrastructure at scale.”

Positioning on the market

It is important to focus on key differentiating characteristics that the project has, which show what makes the project unique and avoid competition with any of the components that it integrates.

StarlingX belongs to the software infrastructure space on the market and can be categorized as a cloud platform. What makes the project stand out:

  • It is a 2-in-1 solution as it provides infrastructure coupled with the ability of management & operations.
  • It is a distributed cloud platform by design. While the main components that it integrates were not equipped to operate in a geographically distributed environment, StarlingX provides the missing pieces to implement such configuration with ease.

Talking points, or in other words, what to highlight about the project

When talking about StarlingX, remember that it is a mature platform that has been running in production at various places around the globe for years, and use that as a baseline for information sharing and talking points you’re planning to highlight. You don’t need to prove that the project is ready to be put to the test, let the project speak for itself.

It is beneficial to focus on the project’s capabilities in conversations and in any direct or related marketing campaigns alike. If you have a user or customer testimonial to go with any of the below talking points, don’t miss to include that! Testimonials speak to the community’s success, which also includes your success as a contributor or user yourself. It further encourages organizations to invest in the project in different ways, which will contribute to the community’s success and sustainability, which is in everyone’s interest.

Distributed cloud platform

As opposed to saying that StarlingX is an ‘edge platform’, which is both very loosely defined and limiting, you should describe the project as a 'distributed cloud platform’. This gives your audience a foundation to build on.

You can then go into specifics that fit the topic area you would like to highlight, like how the project supports resource-constraint sites, can handle unstable network connection between sites, and more. Many of these happen to also fulfill edge-computing requirements, while also increasing the range of the platform in general.

With this strategy, your audience will know exactly what you are talking about and what kind of infrastructure to picture, and how they can utilize it for their use case.

Versatile infrastructure software stack

Never miss an opportunity to showcase all things that StarlingX is, beyond being a cloud platform. One of the key characteristics that make the project stand out and be desirable is that it gives its users the capability to manage and orchestrate their end-to-end distributed infrastructure, which not many other platforms on the market do.

Tailor to current, demanding use cases

  • High-performance
  • Real-time
  • Includes HW and SW management
  • If you are trying to make the platform appeal to a telecom audience, you can refer to “Day 2 operations support” in StarlingX

Fully-integrated stack

Talking about how StarlingX is a fully-integrated stack, and with that a monolithic platform, is not trivial, because it can play to your disadvantage very quickly. You need to be thoughtful with this one. It is important to understand that a platform like StarlingX is always an opinionated stack. It doesn’t matter whether it is the opinion of one vendor company or an entire open source community, when someone is evaluating it, who hasn’t participated in designing and developing the project.

It is a good strategy to acknowledge the fact that this is an opinionated stack right up front. From there you can highlight how this is advantageous to a user. You can rely on the following:

  • The platform was designed with the challenges of deploying and operating infrastructure on a large scale in mind.
  • The platform integrates critical software components to build a modern software infrastructure stack, a new user doesn’t have to go through the burden of evaluating, learning and integrating every single piece one-by-one.
  • The platform is customizable through tweaking configuration options, but it protects its users from being overwhelmed by the infinite number of options that they get when building something from scratch. StarlingX is a complex platform, because large-scale, distributed infrastructure is complex by nature. However, it is an already built and ready-to-deploy and operate infrastructure in just one ISO.

“It just works”

This is a quote from a user, which highlights the difference between deploying infrastructure piece-by-piece from scratch, versus using StarlingX that gives the user everything starting from one simple ISO. You can elaborate on how this reduces the time needed to set up a system, get it running and start bringing in revenue.

Wide range of applicability

The project is widely used in the telecommunications industry, which people often use as a primary label and which gives the impression that this is the only use case for the platform. You can turn this around by highlighting what connectivity, that telecom operators provide, enables, which in reality covers the majority of today’s use cases that involves digital infrastructure:

  • Edge Computing

    • Use this term to label applications, as opposed to the infrastructure. This gives the impression that the platform is widely applicable, and it gives the opportunity to highlight its capabilities even if there is confusion around what edge computing really is.

  • Some industry segments you can throw in as further examples

    • Transportation
    • Healthcare
    • Industrial automation

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” - Aristotle

This might sound cheesy, but this quote is highly applicable here.

Make sure you don’t limit the platform’s capabilities to what its components can do individually. The platform is unique because it enables Kubernetes and OpenStack alike to operate in a configuration that they cannot do on their own. For instance, you can highlight how StarlingX allows Kubernetes and OpenStack to run in a geographically distributed configuration, without the need to deploy anything other than what’s included in StarlingX already!

If someone just wants a Kubernetes distribution, or an OpenStack distribution, to run in one datacenter and have the team to do so, they potentially don’t need StarlingX, and that is OK. Avoid entering the competition with individual distributions, and always focus on the challenges that a user is trying to solve, and how StarlingX can solve it for them.

StarlingX is open source, and what to say about that

Technology is always exciting to talk about, but don’t forget about the open source nature of the project and the community behind it!

Talking about open source is not trivial. The concept is still new to a lot of people and companies, and even if some people know about it and even participate, others in their organizations might still be new to the entire concept.

Whether you are new to the concept yourself, or a veteran in the ecosystem, there are a few talking points you can focus on that highlight the relevance of open source to the commercial software space. Sticking to these concepts can help you make a point without getting into religious arguments, while keeping important aspects in the focus point that everyone in the conversation can benefit from.

Open source is an investment

When you think and talk about open source projects, such as StarlingX, it is important to be clear about the fact that relying on these projects is an investment. While the artifacts are freely available, the focus needs to be on the fact that they are part of a solution that you are building, selling or using, and making that solution work will always require investment.

If you are involved in the community, as opposed to saying you are “contributing to StarlingX”, change the narrative and say you are “investing in StarlingX”. This opens up the door to talk about your choice and the return on your investment.

Tell people WHY you are investing

Sustainable software development

When you talk about the community, don’t miss to highlight that it provides everyone who participates with a sustainable software development process. Building something together with partners, and even competitors, lowers the development and maintenance cost for everybody. By highlighting this, you will invite more organizations to join the community.

Cost reduction

Collaborative development gives community members the opportunity to lower their development and maintenance cost. With all the testing and vulnerability management work that many open source communities, including StarlingX, do, it can also reduce integration costs for users.

More robust software through collaborative development

Collaborative software development also ensures diverse points of view, which the end result benefits from tremendously. You can highlight the importance of the feedback and input the community is getting from current and potential users as well as vendors, which make StarlingX more robust and versatile.

Tell people HOW you are investing

There are multiple ways to invest in an open source project, some of those are more straightforward while others are less trivial. Promoting the ways you choose to invest in a project has multiple advantages. You can show that you have an end-to-end strategy that includes the open source project you rely on. This shows thought leadership and expertise and also provides your customers with a sense of stability. In addition, when you show your work in a community, you also inspire others in the ecosystem to follow your footstep, which can then lead to a more diverse community with more resources to work with!

Upstream work

If you’ve made the step to participate in the open source community to work on code, testing, documentation, and more, you should not shy away from telling about it to everyone!

Examples to consider:

  • You can point to new features in the project that you and people from your organization worked on.
  • Testing can seem like an uninteresting topic. However, if you did any refactoring work in that area recently, increased code coverage, or set up a new CI system, these are all great ways to show that you are investing in the long-term maintainability of the open source project.
Donating infrastructure

If your organization is one of those that is donating hardware infrastructure to open source communities, you are making a huge difference. You should talk about it!

Access to hardware is critical for open source projects to be able to test their work and put together demos from time to time. The ability to run tests on diverse hardware platforms is also crucial. Showing how you are supporting that work is a great example to the ecosystem, and also shows how much you care about both the functionality and long-term sustainability of the project at the same time.

Mentoring newcomers

Whether you and others in your organization are mentoring newcomers in an official setup, like university programs or Outreachy, or actively helping new contributors to get established in the community you are working with, these are the investments that have a bigger return than people would originally think.

By telling people about your efforts in mentoring, you will show how much you care about maintaining the community itself, which is also a testament towards the long-term sustainability of the open source project.

Faster way to innovate

While this can seem counterintuitive, open source projects are well-known to be at the forefront of innovation. The diverse ecosystem around projects is a melting pot for new ideas, and that is no different for StarlingX. Highlighting the opportunities to bring and build new ideas into and with the platform can help further growing and diversifying the StarlingX community!

Building an ecosystem

Having a diverse and thriving ecosystem around the StarlingX project is key to its success and longevity. The community benefits from the involvement of users along with vendor companies, as that creates a feedback loop that guarantees that the platform is rich in features and highly functional at the same time.

Knowing about and being part of the ecosystem is beneficial for everyone, who’s looking into or already utilizing the project. Never miss an opportunity to highlight the ecosystem and any event or forum where people can learn more and participate!

Project vs product

It is very important to differentiate between the product that is part of your commercial portfolio, and the open source projects you built it on. You need to do that in two ways:

  • Always make a clear distinction between StarlingX, and your product and services that you’ve built around the project. Make sure that it is easy to understand what belongs to the open source project and what is part of your commercial offering.
  • Take the opportunity and market StarlingX for its own merits, independently from your commercial offering(s).

Elevating the community in marketing communications will turn into your advantage in the long run. It is key to diversify and grow the community and ecosystem, so you can ensure the project’s long-term success and sustainability. If you participate in making the project more widely known, you can reach a larger audience, and people will see StarlingX as a solid foundation of your product(s), when you talk about the platform in that context.

Phrases and strategies to avoid

Do NOT call StarlingX a Kubernetes or OpenStack distribution

While StarlingX integrates them both, when you refer to the platform as a distribution of either that belittles its capabilities and removes the attention from the bigger picture, and its main capabilities that make it stand out.

This categorization also puts StarlingX into direct comparison and competition with other distributions on a highly saturated market, and with that leaves less opportunities to highlight the platform’s added values.

Do NOT refer to the platform as cloud-native infrastructure

‘Cloud-native’ is a great term to tap into for marketing purposes, BUT, you need to be careful how you apply it to StarlingX.

The term originally targeted the application space to refer to their readiness to run in a cloud environment, by definition it also refers to architectural choices, like using microservices. However, people also often use it to refer to using containers, Kubernetes and other services in the CNCF ecosystem. The term became somewhat overused recently, for instance ‘cloud-native’ is more and more often used to label cloud infrastructure, but it is less clear what that label actually means in that context and can lead to confusions and misconceptions about the platform.

Instead of labeling StarlingX with ‘cloud-native infrastructure’, refer to the platform as ‘containerized infrastructure’, which is more straightforward to interpret and opens up the conversation to elaborate on the underlying architecture further. At the same time, you can highlight how StarlingX is a perfect fit to provide infrastructure for cloud-native applications, and talk about all the features and characteristics that users can rely on to onboard and run their applications on the platform.

Do NOT call StarlingX a telco platform

The StarlingX platform is very popular in the telecommunications industry, due to capabilities in general, and some features that cater specifically for that segment. However, the platform is not specific to telecom networks, and therefore it is important to avoid putting it into that one box. Indicating that it is a telecom platform can easily discourage organizations in other industry segments from considering it as an option for them, which drastically reduces the potential user base.

Do NOT label StarlingX as an edge platform

The term ‘edge computing’ went through a big hype, and there’s still confusion around what and where ‘edge’ actually is. While you still want to talk about ‘edge’ and tap into that ecosystem, be careful about how you choose to do so!

Calling StarlingX an ‘edge platform’ doesn’t work as well anymore as it did in the past. For instance, you can easily end up in an argument to specify ‘edge’ first in the conversation and only get to talk about StarlingX afterwards. People also often think of small devices when talking about an ‘edge platform’, which is not what StarlingX is, and that can lead to confusion.

A good general approach is to refer to StarlingX as a ‘distributed cloud platform’ and call out edge use cases that the project is already used for, or is relevant to that you would like to introduce.

AVOID statements that look like you need to prove that StarlingX is as good as proprietary platforms

It gives the impression that open source software isn’t as good as proprietary, and leaves you with having to unnecessarily defend open source, which also draws attention away from StarlingX. Let the platform’s users and capabilities speak for themselves!

What can you do if you are a

Contributor

  • Write blog posts

    • Introduce new features
    • Write how-to’s
  • Encourage others in your network and online to get involved in StarlingX
  • Talk about what, why and how you are contributing to the project

Vendor

  • Write blog posts

    • Case studies
  • Talk about why you picked the project and how you are relying on it
  • Talk about what and how you are investing in the open source project and how you get return on your investment

User

  • Write blog posts

    • Case studies
  • Talk about why you picked the project and how you are relying on it
  • Highlight how you’re working with the community and your vendor(s)

Samples posts and templates

Phrases

  • StarlingX is an open-source software project empowering organizations to deploy and manage high-performance, distributed cloud infrastructure at scale.
  • StarlingX is a 2-in-1 distributed cloud platform solution as it provides infrastructure coupled with the ability of management & operations.
  • The StarlingX was designed with the challenges of deploying and operating infrastructure on a large scale in mind.
  • StarlingX gives its users the capability to manage and orchestrate their end-to-end distributed infrastructure, which not many other platforms on the market do.
  • StarlingX is tailored to current, demanding use cases including: high-performance, real-time, and HW and SW management

Posts

The OpenInfra Foundation supports a StarlingX page on X (formerly Twitter) and Mastodon. When posting to either of those platforms always feel free to tag us so we can reshare and help to expand the reach.

While tagging us directly is the best way to let us know about your post, using “#StarlingX” over “@StarlingX” is often better to increase the organic visibility of the post. It is best if you can use both the ‘#’ and ‘@‘, but if that is not possible we recommend using the ‘#’, and then sending us a direct message with the post or emailing us with the post link so we can amplify and widen its reach.

Encourage involvement from new community members

Sample text: The #StarlingX community is currently in the [release number] release cycle, where they are evaluating which features and new functionality to prioritize for this version of the platform. Join the StarlingX mailing list to hear more! https://lists.starlingx.io/mailman3/lists/starlingx-discuss.lists.starlingx.io/

Share your accomplishments

Sample text: The #StarlingX [release number] release has arrived! The latest edition of StarlingX enables [key feature]. I contributed to this release by [something you contributed to release]. Learn more about StarlingX [release number]! [insert mailing list post]

Share when you are speaking at an event on StarlingX

Sample text: I will be attending [event name] where I will be sharing how StarlingX [the cool thing you will be talking about]! [event link]

Learn more about how the StarlingX project ahead of my talk! https://www.starlingx.io/

Promote the user survey

Sample text: Running or evaluating #StarlingX? We want to hear your feedback! The user survey is your opportunity to provide anonymous feedback to the upstream community. Take the StarlingX User Survey today! https://openinfrafoundation.formstack.com/forms/starlingx_user_survey