Hi – my name is Alexis Richardson and I’m the chairman of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation TOC – Technical Oversight Committee. The TOC is an elected board of nine people. Representing the interests of CNCF’s members, we define and execute the CNCF’s technology strategy. I’m also the CEO and co-founder of Weaveworks, a CNCF member company.
Prometheus and the CNCF
Prometheus is high-quality software for monitoring and analysis of cloud native architectures and time series data. The integration of these features is important for Cloud Native apps, due to the high frequency and volume of instrumentation data in modern architectures.
With today’s announcement that Prometheus is the second project to join the CNCF, I want to talk about what the TOC is doing. Our doors are open to other projects to apply, and we are actively pursuing projects in specific areas.
The CNCF’s goal is to accelerate customer success with Cloud Native applications. When it comes to their software decisions, we believe that customers are looking for guidance, clarity and quality. To that end we aim to:
Increase customer trust in Cloud Native software
Decrease confusion about how to assemble software into real applications
The mechanism for achieving this is to unite high quality and relevant projects into a foundation. Customers can trust the CNCF to identify and support the very best projects, and, over time, use them to implement a wide range of use cases using Cloud Native architectures. For a summary of why this matters please have a look at this article I wrote on TNS last year.
What projects is CNCF looking for?
In broad terms: right now we want excellent open source projects, that are already up and running, and proven to solve a problem for Cloud Native applications. Not all projects are suited to the CNCF. We have brand values and selection criteria, which I spoke about at a recent Linux conference (slides).
Our criteria are: First a project must demonstrate high quality and high velocity; Second, a project must be Cloud Native; and Third, the project must have an affinity with the foundation – i.e. the community of developers and users have to want it.
The Prometheus vote was unanimous, because it exemplifies the type of project that the CNCF TOC is looking for. To learn more, please read the project proposal and intro slides. And the community are happy. The TOC’s unanimous vote shows how the CNCF members can unite and act together decisively for the benefit of the wider Cloud Native community.
What’s next for Prometheus?
Originated at SoundCloud, Prometheus gained adoption in a short time with an impressive spread of end users. For example at Weaveworks we are very happy Prometheus users: along with Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform it underpins our cloud service.
In addition to customer adoption, Prometheus’ product development continues to move at high speed. With help from the CNCF, these will now accelerate even further. Some CNCF members will work on the project to broaden its use cases. And we intend to raise the profile of the project through demonstrating examples, interoperability and performance.
I’ll leave the last word with the community on prometheus.io:
“By joining the CNCF, we hope to establish a clear and sustainable project governance model, as well as benefit from the resources, infrastructure, and advice that the independent foundation provides to its members”
There is much more to come. Watch this space.
— Alexis