Open-source product innovation with Paladin Cloud

A one-size-fits-all security platform no longer works, since every cloud, system, and codebase carries its own vulnerabilities - Paladin Cloud's founders wanted to solve this with an open-source, security-as-code approach where that open genesis was the biggest strength, not a weakness. After raising its seed round, the engagement focused on modernizing an existing open-source project with new features and functionality, reaching quick alignment through a customized design sprint, and launching the new product in three months by leaning on Paladin Cloud's domain expertise.

The founding team had a clear vision to minimize the time to value. We worked with the founding team to create methodologies to ensure that users would be able to complete the installation and start securing their cloud in under 60 minutes.

• The delivery package for Paladin’s open-source solution: We helped Paladin Cloud expand its plugin-based architecture. The objective was to make its core adaptable and extensible to prepare not just for a variety of use cases, but to easily integrate with a company’s multi and hybrid cloud product strategy that would extend into an enterprise SaaS solution.

• Paying attention to documentation: We helped develop proper documentation both in and outside the repository as it plays a crucial role in driving adoption for an open-source project.  Documentation minimizes the time spent on addressing fundamental questions from the community, allowing engineers to focus on larger issues raised. In partnership with the Head of Developer Success, wiki and user guides became a critical feature of the product and an essential area of collaboration.  

• Community discussions: We also collaborated with the Paladin Cloud team to encourage community interactions and discussions. We used Gitter, Slack, and GitHub to encourage feedback and facilitate improvements.

• Pull request and issue templates: We supported Paladin’s team in setting up pull requests and issue templates with pre-populated information. These templates helped users capture the appropriate information about an issue quickly, and enabled us resolve them faster.

• Contributing readme: As part of the deliverables, we also co-generated a CONTRIBUTING.md file with information for the community about any development/release standards that they expected to follow. This provided clarity to the users and helped to align on best practices being followed in the repository.

• Release strategy communication: We worked with the customer team to create branching strategies that defined how they plan to release particular versions of their solution. This helped users prepare for what’s to come and plan their usage. During every new release, the team ensured that they highlighted the changes made in for the new release to mitigate surprises.

• Robust CI/CD pipelines: A robust Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is non-negotiable for any product. We used it to ensure shorter feedback loops and to steadily make progress on product development milestones. It helped avoid long pull request times and the need to manually test each community-raised pull request before processing it, streamlining development even further.

By focusing on plugin-based extensibility, strong documentation, and community-first practices like templated pull requests and clear release communication, Zemoso helped Paladin Cloud get users securing their cloud environments in under 60 minutes - and helped the product earn recognition from TechCrunch and a spot on the 2022 Red Herring Top 100 Global Company list.