Posted on August 19, 2020

Today, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Thanos as an incubation-level hosted project.

Thanos is a metric system that provides a simple and cost-effective way to centralize and scale Prometheus based systems. The project was created at Improbable to enable reliable monitoring on a global scale.

“The community is very excited to welcome Thanos as a CNCF incubating project,” said Katie Gamanji, CNCF TOC member, and cloud platform engineer at American Express. “The project has a solid foundation with multiple success stories while being supported by a healthy contributor base and an end-user inclusive triage team. It has a well-defined focus on interoperable components, integrating with Kubernetes, Prometheus, and other CNCF projects, making it a great fit for the CNCF community.”

Thanos is used in production by Alibaba Cloud, Banzai Cloud, HelloFresh, Monzo, Red Hat, and more. The project has 7 maintainers from 4 different companies – AdForm, Grafana Labs, Red Hat, and Utility Warehouse.

“We’re very excited to see Thanos move from the CNCF Sandbox to incubation,” said Frederic Branczyk, Thanos maintainer. “Thanos was built from the ground up to be an easy solution to set up and help users transition from Prometheus instances to a global metrics view with long term storage capabilities. We look forward to working with the community to continue to build new features and grow end user adoption.”

Most Thanos deployments run on Kubernetes, but the project can be used to monitor and alert on microservices and infrastructures that span multiple clusters and multiple clouds.

Main Thanos Features:

Notable Milestones:

Thanos builds on the work being done by the Prometheus community by scaling out, providing users with a global view of all their metrics without aggregations. It leverages the Prometheus 2.0 storage format to cost-efficiently store historical metric data in any object storage while retaining fast query latencies. Additionally, it provides a global query view across all Prometheus installations and merges data from Prometheus HA pairs on the fly.

“Monitoring is a critical component of any cloud native infrastructure and long term storage can be challenging,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Thanos helps to extend the capabilities of Prometheus to run monitoring cost-efficiently at scale and we are happy to see the Thanos community mature.”

“On top of technical achievements of Thanos, I am proud of what we have achieved in terms of pushing boundaries for project best practices, tooling, code quality, a self-dependent community and particularly – student mentoring,” said Bartek Płotka, Thanos co-author and principal software engineer at Red Hat. “Thanks to Google Summer of Code, and CNCF’s Community Bridge programs, the Thanos team was able to mentor 6 diverse community members from around the world. We are excited to be able to continue such efforts in future!”

As a CNCF hosted project, joining incubating technologies like OpenTracing, gRPC, CNI, Notary, NATS, Linkerd, Rook, etcd, OPA, CRI-O, TiKV, CloudEvents, Falco, Argo, Dragonfly, and SPIFFE and SPIRE, Contour, and Operator Framework, Thanos is part of a neutral foundation aligned with its technical interests, as well as the larger Linux Foundation, which provides governance, marketing support, and community outreach.

Every CNCF project has an associated maturity level: sandbox, incubating, or graduated. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.

To learn more about Thanos, visit https://thanos.io/.