Going all-in on Cloud Native
This month, the open-source monitoring solution Prometheus graduated as a cloud-native project. They announced this news at PromCon — a conference entirely dedicated to the monitoring system. For a software project to move away from incubator state to graduated means, it has demonstrated growing adoption, a well documented and structured governance process, and a strong commitment to community sustainability and inclusivity.
Prometheus is the second project after Kubernetes that reaches this status within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The foundation started in 2015 with the rising interest in containers and primarily focuses on promoting containers. The CNCF is part of the larger Linux Foundation group, which supports the creation of sustainable open-source ecosystems.
The CNCF focuses on systems that have specific characteristics defining Cloud Native:
- Container packaged: running applications and processes in software containers as an isolated unit of application deployment, and as a mechanism to achieve high levels of resource isolation. This improves the overall developer experience, fosters code and component reuse and simplify operations for cloud-native applications.
- Dynamically managed: actively scheduled and controlled by a central orchestrating process. Radically improved machine efficiency and resource utilisation while reducing the cost associated with maintenance and operations.
- Micro-service oriented: loosely coupled with explicitly described dependencies (e.g. through service endpoints). This significantly increases the overall agility and maintainability of applications. The foundation will shape the evolution of the technology to advance state of the art application management and to make the technology ubiquitous and readily available through reliable interfaces.
With these properties in mind, they also value the fact that the project is platform agnostic. Agnostic in this context comes down to the point that the specifications developed will not be platform-specific such that the implementation can take place on a variety of architectures or operations systems. This flexible nature is something that we appreciate sincerely at In The Pocket. It’s vital that we can develop our products without the risk of having vendor lock-in. This way we are flexible in choosing a particular cloud provider based on client needs or specific requirements.
Today we heavily rely on Kubernetes and are in the process of activating Prometheus on most of our projects to increase insights and improve our response time should specific issues arise. Another project within the CNCF we are actively using is Helm, a package manager for Kubernetes. It makes complex application deployment on Kubernetes manageable. It’s still in the incubator phase but already has significant adoption. When looking at a recent survey, we can see that more than 60% of the organizations are using Helm to manage their applications on Kubernetes.
Conclusion
These three projects have become essential in our daily operations. The fact that the CNCF backs them makes us confident that we can rely on them in the near and far future. We can focus on what we do best, developing excellent digital products, while we stand on the shoulders of these giants.
Originally published at inthepocket.com.
