Better supporting our contributors and active users

Supporting our Contributors and Active Users - Our commitment to better support those who contribute.

COMPANY-UPDATES

April 26, 2023

4 min read

John Lafleur

Summarize with AI:

Better supporting our contributors and active users

Hello Airbyte’s friends,

Today is a big day for our community, as we make some significant changes to how we provide support to our community of users and contributors.

In the past few quarters, the number of Airbyte open-source active users has been increasing faster than ever. We now have more than 3,000 companies using Airbyte to power their data pipelines. Unfortunately, the support experience we have been providing lately can’t scale with that growth. This started to result in longer time to reply for support tickets, but also for contribution PRs. We needed to find a way to make our support approach scalable and a lot less correlated to the growth of our community. More importantly, we need to do so while providing a better experience to our active user base and our contributors.

With that in mind, here are the changes we are introducing today.

Fostering self-serve and self-help on Slack & Discourse

The only way we can support our growth is by promoting self-serve and self-help by other community members in your support needs. So, on Slack, we are going to split our channel #airbyte-help in several subchannels:

#help-connections-issues: for any questions or issues on your connections
#help-infrastructure-deployment: for any questions or issues on your deployment and infrastructure
#help-connector-development: for any questions about on the CDKs and issues while building a custom connector
#help-api-cli-orchestration: for any questions or issues about the API, CLI, any scheduling effort.
#help-contributions: for any questions about contributing to Airbyte’s codebase

Splitting the channels will lower the number of requests per day on each topic and make it more manageable for our users to help each other, as they will be able to focus on the topics that interest them most.

We also published an AI-bot named Kapa to help with self-serve. Kapa will look for previous answers and our docs to automatically feed them to you. Kapa will most likely be a bit rough on the edges at first, until he learns to get better. So we need a bit of patience on it at first.

In addition to these changes, we will be investing in more self-serve content, i.e. guides, troubleshooting tutorials, knowledge base, in order to make the self-serve support experience easier. Please don’t hesitate to search in our forum for answers.

Offering daily office hours

Our support team won’t be focusing anymore on replying to all our Slack and Discourse tickets, but will be offering a daily office hour:

At 1pm PT on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
At 4pm CEST (Europe) on Tuesday and Thursday

Our goal here is to cover all the multiple time zones our community is present at. We will set up reminders in the #office-hour Slack channels every day.

That way, if you have an issue that you cannot resolve by yourself, our team will still be able to help you during those office hours.

These office hours will have the following structure:

Each day will have a topic, i.e. connectors, CLI, etc.
These topics will cover the first 20 minutes, and the remaining 25 minutes will be open for questions.

This change will give our support team a lot more time to provide a better experience to our contributors and active users.

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More time to address our community PRs

We have had an impressive number of community pull requests (PRs) in the last 3 months with an average of 3-5 new PRs a day! It would be beneficial to the whole community if we were able to sustain the demand and merge them (after obviously testing them thoroughly as we don’t want breaking changes or new bugs introduced). This requires a lot of time for our team.

With the time the team got back from no longer providing support to every ticket on Slack and Discourse, our team will be focused on addressing this backlog of PRs, starting with PRs concerning GA connectors.

This also enables us to unlock our contributor program, in which we would cherry-pick issues and features that we would give a financial reward to our contributors once they address them. This would again increase the number of community PRs but can only be considered if we are able to review all those PRs in time too.

Our goal here is to enable our contributors to have the impact they wish to have on the project and accelerate the overall engineering velocity.

So what about our active user base?

Announcing our first premium support package for our open-source users

We now offer our first premium support packages to our open-source active users. We will start with one package: Premier support.

Premier support comes with:

1-business-day SLA for your Severity 0 and 1
2-business-day SLA for your Severity 2 and 3
1-week Pull Request review SLA for first comment

If you need better SLA times, we can definitely discuss this, don't hesitate to talk to our team about it. You can also see more details about it in our pricing page.

We will provide support on your connector, infrastructure, API/CLI/orchestrations, upgrade management, and connector development issues. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us in the #airbyte-self-managed channel on Slack if you’re interested.

Premium support is the first stepping stone. As you might have guessed, we will soon start offering licensed features for our open-source users, such as SSO, Role-Based Access Control, Automated Schema Change Handling, Column Selection, Checkpointing, Stream Parallelization, and much more. If you want to chat about those, don’t hesitate to post on that same channel #airbyte-self-managed.

Conclusion

We understand these changes will change the way our community will find answers to their questions, but we’re deeply convinced this will bring a positive impact for everyone. It will accelerate our progress on the platform with an improved contributor experience, in addition to providing premium support to companies that want to power all their prod pipelines with Airbyte.

All those changes will be implemented today. Let us know in #community-strategy if you have any questions.

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About the Author

John Lafleur

John Lafleur is the COO and Co-Founder of Airbyte.