Kubefirst: A Branding Story
An exploration of the kubefirst brand and the origin story behind our K-Ray mascot.
The branding at kubefirst has been a really fun story that's far from over. In the coming months, there will be more changes to come, as our company adjusts for our new brighter future, and our product line expands to accommodate the needs of the kubernetes platform building community.
2019: A Brand is Born
The idea of kubefirst started the way most good products start, by mastering the pain in the trenches of a problem space, and then having enough passion to bring an improvement to your industry.
Our problem? Companies are building kubernetes platforms for their software teams that will take months to build from scratch, even with full teams dedicated to the effort. All of these cloud native platforms, if they're well built, will have a ton of similarities, both in tooling and in discipline. Building a cloud native platform that can scale for a software company is a complex undertaking and there's a lot to get right. It takes too long to be production ready.
But at Kubefirst, we think you should have it all working instantly for free with the click of a button. We think you should be able to keep all of it and change any of it too. Our platform is open source, installs an entire platform of capability for your software company in minutes, and is built to be self managed, owned completely by you, without strings attached. We have a community of hundreds of engineers who are using these same tools the same way. Click here to take a look at our community slack workspace.
This was the train ride to Datadog Dash where kubefirst was born. Discussing the countless companies investing millions in engineering kubernetes platforms from scratch and struggling to do it well. We knew how they wanted their platforms built, and we knew that it could be given to them in minutes. We bought the kubefirst domain on the train ride home.
2020: Open Sourcing Kubefirst
We started building the kubefirst product and after a year-long stealth enterprise pilot with Virtru, we were finally ready to open source the project and talk about Kubefirst to the public.
Unfortunately, neither of our two technical founders had any artistic skills. So we used designevo to build our first logo, confident that someday we'd have an opportunity to care a lot more about such a non-technical detail.
Our original kubefirst logo was the container ship shown here. To us, it demonstrated safety while navigating the turbulent seas of cloud native technologies. It represented products of all shapes and sizes that can deliver in a uniform way. We enjoyed how it presented our stable foundational infrastructure that can globally scale.
Perfect? Perhaps not, but we loved it. In fact the only thing we truly didn't like about it was that anyone else could go over to designevo and build one just like it. But we had nothing better and it was a great start for us.
2021: Acquired and Rebranded
After open sourcing the project, the 2-person team began a capital raise in early 2021. The motion was interrupted by an acquisition of the project by Kubeshop. The Kubeshop acquisition gave us an immediate opportunity to build a tiny engineering team so we could expand our product into additional cloud spaces and git providers, which was a big part of our platform cloud portability story.
To our delight, Kubeshop also had a design team that we could use, which we were more than excited to take advantage of. Our first order of business was to recreate our kubefirst logo to use for our product and startup.
The Kubefirst Mascot K-Ray
We wanted a lot out of our new K-Ray logo and our newfound design team really delivered for us. We wanted a friendly and approachable mascot. Aquatic to represent the turbulent cloud native seas but still smooth and swift in its ability to navigate them. Wide to represent the large scope of the platform. The stars are representative of your ability to launch, explore, and navigate.
The 7 stars on K-Ray's back are an adaptation of the Pleiades constellation. In Greek mythology, the Pleiades, also known as the 7 sisters, were said to be daughters of Atlas (the god of strength and endurance) and Pleione (protectress of sailing). At night in the Northern hemisphere, you can see Orion shoot his arrow at the Pleiades constellation cluster which makes it pretty easy to find, especially in the winter months. It's really fun seeing our project in the evening sky.
Coincidentally, during most of our 2 years while we were at Kubeshop, we had exactly 7 people on our team (2 tech founders, 3 eng, 1 devrel, 1 ux). During that chapter, we regularly referred to ourselves as the 7 stars of kubefirst as a nod to our beloved mascot. We've grown in culture to feel like the team behind the project is being represented as the stars on K-Ray's back.
Getting to Know K-Ray
Many think that K-Ray is a stingray, but they're actually a manta ray. Mantas are bigger, more gentle, and better to swim with, mostly because they never decide that it's time to kill you. Older stingrays have also been known to leave oil stains on American driveways. Yuck.
K-Ray loves to swim freely in the ocean and lives on a healthy steady diet of GitHub stars.
Our team of cloud native manta engineers have developed and safely implanted a slim instrument to track K-Ray's motions and eating habits while at sea. Whenever someone gives our repository a GitHub star for K-Ray to eat, this instrument will send a beacon to let us know about the meal, and where it came from.
The instrument has also been designed to monitor K-Ray's health. When someone takes their GitHub star back, it makes K-Ray feel sick, and we'll get a notification about that too so we can understand if something might be wrong with our buddy.
When the notifications grow sparse, K-Ray has been known to be found swimming deeper into the depths of the cloud native seas than any other creature on the CNCF landscape.
How To Play With K-Ray Today
We keep a video game embedded in our kubefirst product and also make it available at https://kray.kubefirst.io/
In this adaptation of the classic Flappy Bird, you'll be able to play as our star K-Ray, as they navigate the kubernetes seas through a series of simple GitOps Pipelines.
If you tweet your high score to @kubefirst, we'll even send you some sweet K-Ray swag!!
2023: The Future of the Kubefirst Brand
We've recently been acquired again and we suddenly have a lot more engineering capacity and ability to execute on our vision. It's incredibly exciting. For the last couple years, K-Ray has encapsulated everything that we do - from our company, to our platform, to our commercial product that we've been working toward. We've loved our K-Ray brand from our hats all the way down to the shoes that we wear, but the kubefirst brand shifts are far from over.
Since we joined the Civo family of companies, we've been building up our team, feverishly working on some stealth new products, and are incredibly excited for some upcoming announcements about both our company and product line this September. Keep an eye out for our next evolution in branding, and give your buddy K-Ray a GitHub star ⭐ so we can all celebrate another open source meal together 💜.
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