Less than six months ago, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Fluent Bit community announced that Fluent Bit had been downloaded and deployed over one billion times. Fluent Bit has now tripled that achievement, surpassing the three billion mark in early October.
Fluent Bit downloads have essentially tripled each year between 2019 and 2021. However, the rate has increased dramatically in 2022. In the first three months of this year, Fluent Bit was being downloaded two to three million times a day. Currently, that figure is averaging 13-14 million times a day.
Fluent Bit is a CNCF-Graduated project under the umbrella of Fluentd, alongside other foundational technologies such as Kubernetes and Prometheus. It is a highly scalable application with a vendor-neutral approach to collecting logs and metrics from different sources, processing them, and sending them to multiple destinations. Later this month, the community will release Fluent Bit v2 which will add support for distributed trace data, or traces, making Fluent Bit fully compatible with OpenTelemetry, a CNCF incubating project.
The ability to handle logs, metrics, and traces — the three pillars of observability — will almost certainly make Fluent Bit an even more attractive option for enterprises looking for a vendor-neutral solution to manage the flow of telemetry data through their observability pipelines.
The dramatic increase in the rate of daily downloads of Fluent Bit can be explained by several factors.
- Enterprises are increasingly embracing observability as a practice to understand what is happening within their systems.
- A recent CNCF survey found that the vast majority of enterprises utilize multiple observability and monitoring tools, making Fluent Bit and its vendor-neutral approach an ideal solution for ensuring that source data is distributed to multiple backends.
- Microservices are now the defacto architecture for delivering cloud-native applications, and Fluent Bit with its small memory and CPU utilization footprint was created with those environments specifically in mind.
- Fluent Bit has proven its ability to process large amounts of data efficiently and is embedded in major Kubernetes distributions including those from AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Of course, none of this success would be possible without the hundreds of contributors, the CNCF, and the open source communities as a whole.
Those who are interested in learning more about open source solutions to the challenges of observability should consider attending Open Observability Day on October 24, 2022. This co-located KubeCon event features 16 sessions and fosters collaboration, discussion, and knowledge sharing of cloud-native observability projects including Prometheus, Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, and OpenMetric. Additionally, we welcome users to join the 8,200+ members in the Fluent Slack channel where they can learn and share their use cases. Finally, those interested in contributing to the Fluent Bit project should check out the repository.