Distr Launch Week: Easy Onboarding with Distr Tutorials
Today is international onboarding day! It's not an official holiday (yet), but we are declaring it so. In fact, we are declaring every day to be international onboarding day, because we are just super excited about onboarding in general. Since the early days of Distr we have been strongly opinionated about onboarding. And now we improve our onboarding experience even further with the release of Distr Tutorials. We just love onboarding!
What is changing?
So far we had an onboarding wizard popping up on the dashboard of new users. As Distr has grown both in features and users, we decided to revisit this approach and create a more flexible and powerful onboarding experience. We are now releasing Distr Tutorials, a way for you to quickly get started with the exact features that matter most to you.
We learned from looking over the shoulders of our users and analyzing the data that a vast majority of users aborted the previous tutorial, when it was time to install the Distr agent via a Docker CLI command. This is totally understandable as it is quite scary to execute a third party docker compose manifest—even if it is completely safe to do and every component is open source.
This is why we introduced more non-intrusive tutorial steps, like white labeling your customer portal, or interacting with the Distr container registry.
Why care about onboarding?
Because as a new user you want to see what we've got, and we are happy to show you. But to that end, sometimes a few minimal one-time setup steps are required – and this is what we want to guide you through. The goal is to get you up and running with the features you want to use, as quickly as possible. In addition we also don't want to force you to talk to a human. Although we are always happy to jump on a call and personally onboard you, we know that many users prefer to do it themselves—often by building Distr from source themselves and running it locally.
Show me what you got – What are these Distr Tutorials?
We split up the onboarding process into smaller, more manageable steps, based on the features you want to use. There are three tutorials:
- Setting up your Customer Portal
- Getting started with Distr Agents and Release Automation
- Getting started with the Registry
Find more information about the tutorials in the Distr quickstart.
Introducing the hello-distr sample application
There are valid reasons to try Distr with a little sample application before onboarding your entire stack.
Our own hello-distr is made for exactly that.
When you start the Agents tutorial, this application will be automatically created in your organization, along with a few other resources.
When stepping through the Registry tutorial, you will also work with the artifacts of this sample application, in order to have your very own registry filled with real artifacts.
If your application is still on the earlier side, the hello-distr
is also a great example using a Python backend and Next.js frontend if you seek inspiration on how to make your application production ready,
build Docker images and automatically deploy images and applications to Distr.
Release Automation is easy
For the full end to end release automation experience, we recommend to use the hello-distr application.
It is set up to use GitHub Actions and our distr-create-version-action for integrating with Distr.
You can fork it and set up your own GitHub Actions workflow, that pushes new releases to your Distr organization.
Your Feedback matters
Did you get curious? You can try out the tutorials yourself by signing up for a free Distr account at signup.distr.sh.
We are very excited about this new onboarding experience and we hope you are too. If you think there is something missing in the tutorials, or if you have any other feedback, please let us know!
Thanks and happy onboarding!
Do you still think that offering self-managed installations is hard?
Distr is a battle tested software distribution platform that helps you scale from your first self-managed customers to dozens and even thousands.