New to the cloud-native world ? CNCF CTO recommends Prometheus

While attending DevWeek 2022 last month I took a break and headed down to South Congress to meet Chris Aniszczyk for lunch.  Chris is the CTO of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation and I wanted to hear how his house remodel was going as well as what was up in the world of the CNCF.  One of the things we talked about was how Prometheus was a great place to get started in the world of cloud-native computing.  Also, just before the camera overheated and shut down (this September was hot in Austin) Chris recommended checking out the recently announced Prometheus certification

 

 

Transcript

Barton Live from Austin, we are here at south Congress sweating like, uh, man, it is hot, but anyway, I'm here with Chris Aniszczyk CTO of the cloud native compute foundation. So how big is CNCF now? I'm remember when you were just. Kubernetes. And you're more than that now.

Chris Yeah. We're 140 plus projects outside of Kubernetes.  [00:00:21] We have Prometheus Envoy, open telemetry, covering all different aspects of the stack. It's not just orchestration anymore. It's about observability. It's about even costs cloud financial management with open costs. We just have a variety of projects and now over 850 members.

Barton Geez, so has it grown like a hockey stick or have you slowly added 10 projects a year?

Chris for projects it's grown basically like a hockey stick. [00:00:46] Cause we've made a couple changes the last couple years where we added an early stage kind of project, uh, uh, definition called sandbox project. Which are earlystage projects. So it's allowed for more early stage experimentation. So that's kind of where all the growth came [00:01:00] from.

Barton [00:01:00] And so do they then wash out or graduate?

Chris Yeah. Sandbox is all about experimenting. Some will graduate and move on to incubation and then graduate or some will be archived. Right? We've had projects like archives. Yeah. Archives is a nice, yeah, they they're archived and you know, not taken out back and you know, but they're, gracefully, uh, shut down and archived.

Barton [00:01:17] So if I were just getting into this space, what would you tell me? I should focus on in the cloud. Say im starting out in DevOps. I'm kind of making my way through it. What would you have people focus on or what would be the areas that youd point 'em to?

Chris Yeah, first, you have to go open up the cloud native landscape.[00:01:34] Go to landscape, to cncf.io and then …

Barton see that there are thousands of thousands of things and panic.

Chris: no that that's not what we're gonna do, but it's still a good, useful thing to do. So if you're new to this space generally a lot of people get started with Kubernetes, which I think is great, but it's a project that's for anything and nothing in particular, in my opinion.  [00:01:53] if you're coming from a more traditional DevOps background, There's a project called Prometheus out there, which is kind of a modern [00:02:00] observability project. I recommend starting there because you could use Prometheus without Kubernetes. it could be used on your own servers that aren't running Kubernetes.  [00:02:09] It's just a great place to get started. I consider it kind of like a gateway drug to more Cloudnative experiences

Barton -- So if people aren't familiar with Prometheus, other than the Greek myth, what would you, say it is?

Chris it's a modern observability, uh, system that was inspired by the observability system out of Google built to monitor Kubernetes. Google built a system to monitor “Borg” (Borg inspired Kubernetes) and that monitoring solution inspired Prometheus.

[00:02:40] So they match pretty well. so, it's a great place to get started. We recently just. Announced that we have a new kind of entry level Prometheus, what we call Prometheus certified associate, which is kind of our very entry…… [Camera overheats]