No doubt many of you have been curious about our progress and plans for Lando...  and with Kalabox officially out of the picture we are happy to start sharing!

What's the current status of Lando?

As most of you already know, Lando is a free and open source project run on mostly volunteer time with Tandem functioning as the primary sponsor of the project. This means that development, support and general maintenance of Lando is done on more-or-less an as-we-can basis.

Despite this Lando has both recently crossed the 11,000 active user threshold and we've made some notable changes in the last few weeks as we continue our slow inexorable march towards the first stable Lando release:

• Lando 3.0.0-rc.20 has been released!
• The Lando Documentation has been reorganized and improved
• A new Lando marketing site has been launched

What doth the future portend?

Perhaps more interesting to you all are our immediate goals as we enter the latter days of 2019:

1. Release a stable 3.0.0 by or on January 1, 2020
2. Build a sustainable foundation for further Lando growth

Let's dive into each...

1. Stable Lando

We made a ton of progress in early 2019 by redoing the internals of Lando with the RC2 release which was a necessary step towards building a lean and agile Lando that was stable and flexible enough to pivot with changes in tech because Lando supports lots of tech and because TECH CHANGES FAST MAN! Since then we've been slowly fixing bugs and adding support for the aforementioned new things.

However, we have not yet cut a stable release because there have been four big things we still want to get into Lando:

• First class support for our currently-experimental fast file sharing Turbo Mode
• Better handling of SSH Keys
• Better and faster Xdebug
• A dedicated and stable lando share service

Of course we will also be trying to do as many bug fixes and other reasonable (eg not API breaking) feature requests as possible but once the four above features are green then stable Lando will be on the scene.

2. Sustainability

When we hit 10,000 active users about three months ago we realized that at some point soonish we were no longer going to be able to deliver satisfactory results to our quickly growing user base or meet increasing infrastructure costs. So, in order to better meet demand and to provide better and more consistent releases, support, etc we've been considering different and longer term sustainability models.

In doing so we quickly realized that if Lando was about liberating developers then there was no way we could accept becoming vassals of venture capital. We also realized after looking at other successful open source projects that it definitely takes a village.

So, over the remainder of the year you will notice us slowly rolling out The Lando Alliance; a movement to liberate developers across the galaxy so they can focus on their most important work.

Expect to see following over the coming months

• Direct solicitations to help build out our social presence, primarily via Twitter followers and GitHub stars
• Advertising via the Carbon network
• Lando services and dedicated support packages for Lando AND your applications
• A Lando Alliance membership program via Patreon. SPOILER ALERT: this is already live but hasn't been officially released yet. Also HUGE KUDOS to the few people who have already discovered this AND joined The Alliance
• An official Maintainers, Contributors and Evangelists Program so we can start building and coordinating a robust and diverse team of people to spread the message of developer freedom far and wide
• An official Lando Mascot and Dance to be seen at various tech conferences

If you find that Lando saves you time, money, frustration, etc then we highly encourage you to join and support our movement so that together we can continue to liberate more and more developers from the shackles of unnecessary work, repeatable steps and tool-fighting and can ensure Lando remains the best and only development tool you need for millennia to come!

If you are interested in any of the above before we roll them out then feel free to contact us beforehand!

We're down to keep solving DevOps for everyone and with your support: we can.