Replicated Use Cases - Support Efficiently

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Hey, welcome back! 

We're still talking about how Replicated can help ISVs deliver software to customer-managed environments. You've probably seen one of these before (Build Better, Install Faster, Sell More), so you're familiar with this concept of the software distribution lifecycle and building beyond the software development lifecycle. We'll help you build better, test and secure everything, sell to more environments, more quickly install faster and more reliably into customer environments, support efficiently, measure what matters in those environments, and do it all again with what you've learned.

Today, let's talk about supporting efficiently. How do we help you better support those customers running your application in their environment? What does this mean? 

It means you need to be able to support and update apps wherever they are running and make it as easy as possible. It's not a SaaS so you can't do it directly, but you can make it easy. 

Here's one thing we see at one of our vendors using Replicated- it was SmartBear. They said support was a massive burden on their DevOps team, with about 20 percent of the team's time dedicated to supporting each deployment. With over half of their total annual revenue coming from on-prem customer managed environments they couldn't just abandon a self-hosted option. Their app now enjoys zero downtime, more frequent releases, and they report a radical reduction in support calls and escalations. 

How did they get to that? Well, let's talk. First of all, a big challenge could be that you're not meeting your SLAs, then that's going to make customers unhappy. So, why do you miss an SLA? Because you don't know what the problem is! Most of the time diagnosing problems is usually spent searching for the right information from the customer. There'll be a lot of back and forth. 

We help accelerate that troubleshooting. We can collect comprehensive support bundles of logs, audit info, environment info, version history, all this kind of diagnostic info, in one pack so you're ready to go. That's going to help you meet that SLA. 

You might also have challenges reproducing customer issues. You may not know what distro, what platform, or what the current state of the version is. The problem could be specific to each of those. But, you can't solve them if you can't recreate the environment. With Replicated, we can give you all of that information. It’s easy to see what version they're on, be able to monitor their adoption, their uptake of new versions, give you everything you need to know about the environment, and we can help you quickly reproduce. You can provision a matching environment and then spin it up and test in your own environment, but that matches identically to the customer’s. You can give a patch to your customer with assurance that it's going to work, not just to keep testing in their environment.  We want to make sure you get it right the first time you're trying to address their issue. 

A common challenge is that customers are running into problems because they're running old versions of your software and they're having issues with it. If they're still back on 1. 0 and you've moved on from that, that release is potentially years old. Why is that? 

First of all, the impact is that they're going to be exposed to bugs and vulnerabilities that may have been fixed in newer versions. But the ‘why’ it is is because it's hard for them or they're busy or they're concerned - is it going to install correctly? Is the update going to work correctly? 

We enable your customers to get automatic version updates, get patches for CVs, and stay current. We can do this with semantic versioning - make sure they're updating the right things in the right order, and that they're not skipping critical steps in that upgrade path and testing that the environment is suitable for the upgrade. What this means is you have fewer customer support issues, better adoption rates, and reduced likelihood to churn. By the way, better adoption means they're using the latest features - not just they're less exposed to bugs. So, you definitely want to keep them up to date on the latest versions.

Another challenge you might have in supporting customers is it can be difficult and expensive to hire or retain support staff with deep Kubernetes expertise, and knowledge of how to resolve issues sometimes isn't shared. There's often that one wizard in the organization who knows how to do everything, and that increases dependency on that person. Who are the people who really know how to do this? If there aren't many of them in your org, let's make that knowledge democratized. 

We can do a couple things. We can automate many Kubernetes tasks and simplify many others, making things that could be hard much more doable. We can also act as a bit of a knowledge base. You can create custom collectors, analyzers, advisors, and use Troubleshoot.sh to really capture the knowledge of the environment. 

We can also provision ideal environments so you can focus on your application itself, not on the Kubernetes issues. Let us abstract that away for you. 

Well, that was a quick look at how we help support efficiently. I hope it was helpful for you. 

Please reach out if you're interested and thanks for reading today!

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