---
# System prepended metadata

title: Update Carvels landing page

---

# Update Carvels landing page
## About Carvel
Carvel stands for a project under whose umberella we have tools for application building, configuration and deployment to Kubernetes. Carvel provides a set of CLI tools and controllers. CLI tools include but not limited to
-  **ytt** for YAML configuration management. 
- **kapp** for deploying and viewing groups of Kubernetes resources as "applications". 
- **impgpkg** for packaging, distributing and relocating your Kubernetes configuration and dependent OCI images as one OCI artifact.

These tools are single puporse, reliable and composable. Besides these the project has also developed two controllers for package management. These are
- **kapp-controller** for continuous delivery and package management for Kubernetes
- **secretgen-controller** provides APIs to specify what secrets need to be on cluster

More details can be found at https://carvel.dev/

Our contributors are kubernetes enthusiasts looking for alternatives to helm or operator framework. Our users platform engineers who need to manage complex applications on kubernetes for large companies and organizations. Our largest consumer and contributor is using these tools for lifecycle management of the platform they are providing. 

## About the project
### Carvel's documentation problem

We have improved Carvel's website significantly with the new redesign a while back. However, one of the feedbacks that we have heard regularly is that we need clear messaging on Carvel's website. As more prospective users come to the website who are not familiar with any of the tools, it gets challenging for them to understand why Carvel exists and what problems it is trying to solve on a higher level.

When they see a list of tools on the homepage, it can be a cognitive load to go through each tool and learn about them separately which might discourage them to explore more. Carvel.dev's landing page shows a group of tools and then folks need to go into individual tools pages to understand what the tools do. This is good approach, however it does not showcase the power of the composibility of these tools and how the powerful package management APIs can be used for lifecyle management of the production workloads.
There are few other issues in the current documentation like secretgen-controller does not have its own sub-site.
We would also want our users and contributors to have clean paths for discoverying what Carvel can do and how they can contribute for each of the projects.


### Project's scope

Based on the feedback that we have heard so far we want:

- Clear messaging on what is Carvel and what problems it solves.
    - Focus on the why more than the how.
    - It's not possible to talk about each tool and its value. So focus on the top 1-3 values.
- For someone new to Carvel, they need to learn why it exists and how it can help as an integrated suite
    - Have a user journey and talk about how Carvel can be used
- For someone familiar, they can use the current landing page
- Everyone will want to know why it’s different from Helm
    - How can Helm users use Carvel?
    - What does Carvel do better and how can they work together?
- Have an image that shows how these tools are integrated
- Documentation for secretgen-controller to be added to the website.

Some of the above feedback is captured in the following github issues:
1. https://github.com/carvel-dev/carvel/issues/223
2. https://github.com/carvel-dev/carvel/issues/684

However, it would be good idea to have audit done and clear work items defined in terms of usability and flow of the documentation.

We have not identified any technical writer for this project. We would want inputs from good technical writers on how the above can be acheived and we can come up with plan to implement the the top 3 items in 3 months timeframe.

### Measuring your project's success
Post of the implementaion of this project we would want to see significant increase in the following metrics 
- Carvel and the underlying projects are maintained by a core set of contributors. We would like to see this shift and see outside contributors increase significantly.
- Current 'stars' on the repos are maintained by us. we want to see an increase in stars for each of the projects
- Significant increase in downloads for the tools
