Clear messaging on Carvel's website/homepage

[vibhas]

Describe the problem/challenge you have We have improved Carvel's website significantly with the new redesign. However, one of the feedbacks that we have heard regularly is that we need clear messaging on Carvel's website. As more prospective users come to the website who are not familiar with any of the tools, it gets challenging for them to understand why Carvel exists and what problems it is trying to solve on a higher level.

When they see a list of tools on the homepage, it can be a cognitive load to go through each tool and learn about them separately which might discourage them to explore more.

Describe the solution you'd like Some thoughts/ideas that we have heard so far:

• Clear messaging on what is Carvel and what problems it solves.
  • Focus on the why more than the how.
  • It's not possible to talk about each tool and its value. So focus on the top 1-3 values.
• For someone new to carvel, they need to learn why it exists and how it can help as an integrated suite
  • Have a user journey and talk about how Carvel can be used
• For someone familiar, they can use the current landing page
• Everyone will want to know why it’s different from Helm
  • How can Helm users use Carvel?
  • What does Carvel do better and how can they work together?
• Have an image that shows how these tools are integrated

Anything else you would like to add: [Additional information that will assist in solving the issue.]

[pivotaljohn]

Triage: the value of this work is clear. This appears to be a place to capture/evolve thoughts around how to share this message.

As noted, we're getting this feedback somewhat regularly, these days. The priority is at least "important" if not "soon".

[imikushin]

I'd like to add some color to this. Compare Helm and Carvel homepages.

Helm states its purpose: "The package manager for Kubernetes". Without scrolling you'll also read: "Helm is the best way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes." That's it!

One could argue, Carvel could be used as a (much) better package manager for Kubernetes.

Current situation: the tagline on the (pretty loaded) homepage reads: "Build on Kubernetes with confidence", and then the choice is basically "Use the whole suite" (the link leads to installation instructions) or pick the tools you need (How do I know that I need any of those?). There's no single narrative.

A possible better purpose statement for Carvel: "Build and Ship Packages for Kubernetes" And a tagline: "Carvel has the tools you need to develop, package and deliver software on Kubernetes." The page should then explain what Carvel is and major benefits on a very high level. Only then should it offer links to individual tools. The goal is to create the narrative that would be easy to follow and create confidence that Carvel is indeed the right choice :)

[ChristianCiach]

Instead of telling you what should be changed, let me tell you what convinced me (as a new user of the carvel tools) to consider carvel in the first place:

We, just like probably many teams out there, already had existing workflows to build and deploy to kubernetes in place. More often than not it is not feasible to completely abandon your existing tools and workflows in favor of others. For example, we are too heavily reliant on Ansible and Jinja, so we couldn't switch to Helm, which also comes with its own templating engine and other stuff that we don't need.

What really caught my interest was the statement that Carvel is a collection of composable tools that play nice with not only each other, but also with most other tools out there. This means that I can use the Carvel tools to augment our existing workflows instead of replacing them with "one tool that does everything (badly)" like Helm.

For example, https://carvel.dev/kapp/ states:

Plays well with others. Focuses exclusively on deployment procedure and works equally well with configuration tools such as ytt, kustomize, helm template, and any other tool that can produce standard Kubernetes YAML configuration.

I think this cannot be stressed enough! This statement is true of pretty much all of the carvel tools, not only for Kapp. But the front page of carvel.dev unfortunately doesn't mention that at all.

Other than that, I think the current front page of carvel.dev does a pretty good job. But maybe I am not the primary audience? I am a Java developer and (for just over a year now) a self-taught devops engineer.