From Bites to Bytes: The Making of Portworx BBQ

From Bites to Bytes: The Making of Portworx BBQ

As a Technical Marketing Engineer (TME), one of our most important tasks is to highlight the capabilities of the products we support. With products that are part of our everyday lives such as cell phones or laptops, this task might be simple – but with a product that people are less familiar with, we do a fair amount of teaching as part of our demonstrations to help potential customers understand the value of the products. Being unfamiliar with a product means that we as TMEs need to meet customers at a level they have context with so they can more quickly realize the value that they’re getting with our solution. 

To highlight the powerful capabilities of Portworx for container data management, the TME team took a creative approach by developing a fictional company called Portworx BBQ so that it would be easily relatable to our customers. Our Portworx BBQ application not only helps to showcase the storage features of Portworx software, but does so in a way that captures attention and tells a compelling story that is hopefully memorable to attendees of our webinars, Hands-on Labs, and conference demonstrations.

The Concept of Portworx BBQ

Portworx BBQ is a fictional BBQ restaurant, complete with its own website and ordering system. While the restaurant may be fictional, the application is very real and serves as a perfect example to highlight the storage capabilities that Portworx provides. The idea was to create a relatable and easy-to-understand context for demonstrating how Portworx can solve real-world storage challenges in a dynamic and visually appealing way.

In the creation of Portworx BBQ, we wanted to use storytelling to make our technical demonstrations more impactful. Here’s how we approached it:

1. Scenario-Based Demonstrations: By creating common business scenarios that a BBQ restaurant might encounter, such as handling high traffic during peak hours or managing large volumes of customer data, we could show how Portworx handles performance and capacity management situations.
2. User-Friendly Interface: The BBQ app features a user-friendly interface that customers can interact with, simulating a real-world application that they might be accustomed to using on a daily basis. This makes it easier for our audience to understand the practical applications of Portworx’s features that enable the application.

3. Real-Time Problem Solving: Demonstrating real-time problem solving, such as scaling storage resources on-demand or ensuring high availability during a node or zone failure, provides tangible examples of how Portworx excels at Day 2 Operations.
4. Generative AI Chatbot: Incorporating a chatbot into the app allows us to further demonstrate how Portworx can be used to manage generative AI solutions with a real-world scenario.

Key Features Highlighted by Portworx BBQ

The Portworx BBQ application is designed to highlight several key storage features of Portworx software:

1. Dynamic Provisioning: Showcasing how Portworx can dynamically provision storage based on the application’s needs. For instance, when a Kubernetes application, such as the app’s MongoDB database, requests a persistent volume through the CSI specification which stores our BBQ user profiles, and order history information.
2. High Availability and Disaster Recovery: Demonstrating how Portworx ensures data remains available and protected, even in the event of hardware failures or other disruptions. The BBQ app can continue to take orders after a site failure demonstrating data availability. This allows our Cloud Native Architects and TMEs to demonstrate the Portworx DR capabilities such as SyncDR and AsyncDR.
3. Data Security and Backup: Highlighting how Portworx secures sensitive customer information through encryption and ensures that all data is backed up and can be restored quickly through Portworx snapshots or from Portworx Backup. This is critical for maintaining customer trust and operational continuity.
4. Scalability: Showing the seamless scalability of Portworx, enabling the BBQ app to grow with the business. Whether it’s expanding to new locations or handling seasonal spikes in demand, Portworx ensures the storage infrastructure can scale accordingly as your Kubernetes clusters scale.
5. Performance: Illustrating the high-performance capabilities of Portworx with PX-Fast, ensuring that the BBQ app runs smoothly and efficiently, providing a great user experience even during peak times.

Keeping Skills Sharp with Hands-On Experience

Developing Portworx BBQ has also served as an excellent opportunity for our technical marketing team to stay sharp and up-to-date with the latest technologies and best practices. As engineers, we don’t spend all of our time creating neat looking slide decks, and speaking at conferences. We must also keep our skills sharp so we can have deeply technical conversations about the problem potential customers are facing. Portworx BBQ gives our TMEs the opportunity to put ourselves in the shoes of Platform Engineers who have their own apps to manage.

1. Writing Code: By actively participating in the application development process, our team members hone their coding skills, ensuring they remain proficient while learning how our customers run into issues in their own software development lifecycles.

2. CI/CD Pipelines with Git: Utilizing continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines with Git helps our team maintain high standards of code quality and efficiency. This hands-on experience with modern development workflows ensures that our team is experienced in good practices and can identify problems experienced in our industry by devops teams.

3. Integration of New Technologies: Working with generative AI to create the chatbot for the BBQ app allows our team to explore the latest technologies with a purpose, further expanding our skill sets and keeping them at the forefront of technological advancements.

Relatability and Engagement

Unlike traditional “hello world” applications or a series of command-line interface demonstrations, Portworx BBQ is designed to be relatable to our audience. By simulating a real-world business, we can put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and address their pain points more effectively. This approach makes the demonstrations more engaging and memorable, as it shows the practical, everyday benefits of Portworx in a context that our audience can easily understand and appreciate.

The application isn’t all business either. We have a lot of fun with it including coming up with silly menu items like the “Porx Special” which is a secret drink found on our menu. Our mascot, and logo, named Frank, is a pig based on an avatar from one of the original Portworx git repos from early on in our founding. 

And through our Generative AI chatbot built into the application, you can chat with Frank himself who gives you some funny responses along with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) data that is specific to the restaurant. Just ask Frank where the restaurants are located, who the pitmasters are, or what his favorite menu items are some time.

You’ll even see our TME team at conferences and trade shows with Portworx BBQ swag occasionally and it’s been highly requested from other employees so far.

The Impact of Portworx BBQ

By creating the Portworx BBQ demo application, we’ve been able to transform our technical marketing presentations into engaging storytelling sessions. This approach not only makes the technical details more digestible but also allows us to demonstrate the real-world benefits of Portworx software in a more memorable way.

Portworx BBQ serves as a testament to our commitment to effective marketing strategies. It’s more than just a demo app; it’s a powerful tool that brings our storage capabilities to life, ensuring our audience understands and appreciates the full potential of Portworx Enterprise, Portworx Backup, and Portworx Data Services.

It seemed like a pretty weird or silly idea at first, but Portworx BBQ has proven to be a successful venture in showcasing the storage capabilities of Portworx software through an engaging and relatable narrative. By leveraging storytelling, and real-world scenarios, we’ve been able to highlight our software’s capabilities in a way that resonates with our audience and leaves a lasting impression.

See Portworx BBQ in action during our Hands on Labs or talk with your local Portworx Cloud Native Architect and ask for a demo. We hope you’ll try our BBQ very soon.