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\[12:22\] So we had to adapt several times our CI... And even today, it's kind of complex, because we have a build that is generated on the fly for each PR, with each commit, and it allows us to test everything. It allows the contributor to test everything. As you said, as soon as the PR is merged, we generate an exper... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You're right. I'm exactly of the same opinion, and I'm glad that you're seeing in practice the same thing. If you get that right, many things will start happening as a result of that. Super-important. So - big fan. Thank you for sharing that. |
What about from the perspective of things that didn't go so well - but let me make it a bit more positive. What about from the perspective of learning from failure? What failures did you learn from in the last six years from Traefik, or in Traefik? Things that you wish you had done better, or things that in hindsight w... |
**Emile Vauge:** Two things come to my mind. I mean, of course, we did way more mistakes, but two-- |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The ones that stand out. |
**Emile Vauge:** Yeah, two things. So the first thing - I will continue my story that I was talking about... We did build a great community, which is still super-active. But over time, I also founded a company behind the project; I also hired a whole team which is working full-time on it, and today we are 40 people. 40... |
I don't think we did any big mistake, but what I learned is that it was possible to create a great community from a bad project, and to create a big community, but as soon as you go professional with it, it was not that easy to sustain. So that's something important we learned - sustaining a big community is not that e... |
And another thing, a mistake, I guess, that we made is the big gap between 1.x and 2 branch on Traefik. We decided at that time that many things were not that great with the architecture of the 1.x branch, so we wanted to revamp the project basically. I'll just give you one technical example. For example, in the 1.x br... |
\[16:21\] So that's one mistake we did. We were convinced internally, in the company, that CRD was the thing to do, but that was not what the majority of the community was thinking... And we learned from that. Sometimes you have a disconnection between your team and the community, and you have to work on that every day... |
**Break:** \[16:55\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm really glad that you mentioned the relationship between the community and the company and the product, because I know how important that is. Not only it's important, but it's very easy to get them out of sync, and then the product goes in certain directions, or the community goes in different dire... |
So what did you do to reconcile those differences between Traefik the company, Traefik the product... Traefik the products, because it's like an experience and it has so many components... And the internal team. How did you reconcile that? Work in progress? |
**Emile Vauge:** Exactly. I mean, it will be work in progress... There is no deadline. It will be always work in progress. You need to work on that every day, as I said, if you want to sustain the connection. One thing we did among others is creating a group of the most active contributors. Kind of a private group, whe... |
\[20:03\] Another thing we did is have a specific process to handle all the input we had from the community every day. To give you an idea, we have so many contributions, PRs, issues, posts on the forum, on Twitter, on Slack. This is so active that we need to have a specific process every day to handle everything. Othe... |
So it's not a joke... As soon as the open source project is big - I mean, you just have to invest in it even more. And you have to have big dedication on it. So yeah, that's how we are dealing with it. We have strong values on it. For example, we don't want a PR to last forever, because it's kind of discouraging for ex... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. I can definitely relate to that. Not only that, but I can see -- I wanna say how important it is, but it feels like I'm not conveying the importance of it significantly enough. So most people think that shipping is where it stops, right? Like, get the code done, get it out there, and that's it. ... |
So what does the system look like for you? Do you have a JIRA? I hope not... I don't know. Do you have JIRA to keep track of things? How do you track things? |
**Emile Vauge:** So we do track things using GitHub, mainly. GitHub is the source of truth for everyone on Traefik. But of course, we use internal tools like Notion for a document, or this kind of stuff... But yeah, GitHub is the main source of truth. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So when you receive, for example, a Tweet or a Slack, do you convert it into an issue, or a discussion on GitHub? What happens with that? |
**Emile Vauge:** Yes. If it makes sense, we convert it into an issue, of course. Because this is the only source of truth on Traefik, the issues and the PR. Of course, the issues are the only source of truth. We don't have an internal tool to have private issues, or this kind of stuff. Everything is public, and everyth... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And do you have a Signal repository, multiple repositories? How does that work? |
**Emile Vauge:** So for Traefik we do have -- that's a good question. I guess we could call it a single repository, and especially now, we do have some plugins in Traefik v2. So they come in a separate repository, each plugin. So yeah, it's a singular repo, I guess. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Do you do any repo syncing, anything like that behind the scenes, so that you centralize all the issues in a single place? Or do you just open issues, for example, for a plugin, in the plugin repo, and then you have a view that merges them all together? How does that look? |
**Emile Vauge:** Yeah, every repo has their own issues. Sometimes we do have some connection between a few issues, between different repos. Traefik is having its own issues, relating another issue on another repo, sometimes on another project, maybe even driven by Traefik Labs... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[24:07\] Okay. So one thing which I noticed is you also started using GitHub Actions a bit more in the last year, six months... Six to twelve months. |
**Emile Vauge:** Exactly. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Why did that happen? That was interesting to see. |
**Emile Vauge:** I think the team at that time was really excited with the GitHub Actions, and they really wanted to take advantage of it. It allowed us to just continue what we were already doing with internal scripts, basically, with just Actions. So I don't think we are doing anything crazy; it just helps us orchest... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. So it's a bit more than a script, because I had a look at especially the documentation workflow, which I haven't seen before. So you have this concept of the Mymirca ant colony which I found really interesting... And there's like different types of ants which have different roles in this colony,... |
**Emile Vauge:** So I don't know every specific aspect of it, but for example, we are dealing with so many contributions that we needed to automate everything as much as possible. The only stuff we didn't automate are the reviews of the PRs, of course. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right, the human element. You need humans for that, yes. |
**Emile Vauge:** Exactly. Exactly. But that's it. The rest is automated. So yes, the documentation, everything is automated. We needed to keep track of all versions of Traefik, because you know, when you only have one version it's easy. But when you have 20, you have to keep track of everything, because not everybody i... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I think this is unavoidable. The bigger the community, the more successful the project, the more it spreads, you need more automation, because it's unsustainable to do these things manually. I love that. That just makes not only sense, but it's a joy to see it in the real world and see what shap... |
I also liked your release cycle. I thought that was really interesting. You mentioned it in the first part of the interview, you mentioned about having three to four minor releases every year. I thought that was great. That makes perfect sense. So can you tell us a bit more about how do the minor releases work, how do ... |
**Emile Vauge:** Alright, so it's pretty common, I guess... We have, as you said, bug fixes, minor releases and major releases. We just followed the semver versioning system. We do approximately 3-4 minor releases per year. Basically, once every three months. And of course, in minor versions - it needs to be backward c... |
\[28:05\] For example, if we need to add something new, it has to be without any breaking change. And with the bug fixes - we have different types of bug fixes, which correspond to different types of issues, with priority issues, I guess... So we have a mechanism where -- for example, if we have a vulnerability discove... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Now, that is something really powerful... Because you saying that, it means that your pipeline for all the supported versions has to be fast. It can't take more than a few hours, all of it... Because if it takes more than a few hours - well, you can't release it in a day. It's just impossible, because... |
**Emile Vauge:** So we support officially the latest minor version of 1.x, and the latest version of 2.x. So we support the two last minor versions of the two branches. So that's what we are doing. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So the priority zero fix, which has to ship today - it has to actually ship in two versions. |
**Emile Vauge:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. What about the other minor releases? Do you still patch them, or you only focus on the latest minors for each major? |
**Emile Vauge:** We do focus on the latest minors, because otherwise it doesn't make sense. As minors, they are backward-compatible. You should just upgrade to the latest minor. That shouldn't be an issue. So that's what we are doing. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes a lot of sense. I also think that it makes perfect sense to only ship bug fixes in patches. Does that mean that even if you add a new feature, which doesn't change anything from the codebase, would you not add it in a patch release? I think you wouldn't, that's my understanding. You wouldn'... |
**Emile Vauge:** No. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, you wouldn't. |
**Emile Vauge:** No, of course. In patch releases we never add a new feature. Never, never. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes perfect sense to me. Okay. Well, I'm glad that it makes sense for Traefik as well. Okay, that's great. So when it comes to new minors that you ship every three months, how long do you support them for? |
**Emile Vauge:** We support them until the next minor, plus a few months. I don't remember exactly the exact numbers. We do have something in the docs to explain that... But yes, once the new version arrives, we support the previous version for a few months, and then we stop. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, okay. And do your users know when to expect new versions? Do you have like a release calendar, or anything like that? |
**Emile Vauge:** Not really. Ideally, we would love to have that, because it's easier. But in fact, we try to not communicate an exact date of release. Why? Because we always have external contributions that we were not expecting, and usually it comes at the last minute, and usually it leads to a discussion, "Huh. This... |
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