The monitoring and alerting toolkit Prometheus has joined Kubernetes in the ranks of graduated projects of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), signaling maturity, quality, and stability.

To make this year’s Prometheus conference PromCon just a bit more exciting, host Richard Hartman got to announce the project’s graduation from the CNCF incubation process. The promotion is supposed to show the foundation’s confidence in the project’s code and feature velocity as well as in the governance and community process established by the project’s members. Since joining the incubation process, the Prometheus team has not only worked on processes, but focused on stability, improving the documentation to facilitate adoption and joining the community, and rewritten the storage backend to be able to handle high churn in services.

Prometheus is a monitoring system and time series database, which was originally built by music streaming service SoundCloud in 2012. To show the open source project’s independence from any company though, Prometheus joined the CNCF in 2016. It therefore became the second project hosted there, the first being the container orchestrator Kubernetes, which was also the first to graduate the foundation’s process. Users of the system include cloud platform provider DigitalOcean, and telecommunications company Ericsson.

The new status as graduated project is also meant to serve as an external quality seal to promote Prometheus, with the project presently being in its fourth stage of adoption, which is – according to Hartmann – adoption by “users lacking funding and/or resources to focus on monitoring, but hearing about the benefits of Prometheus from various places”. Preceding phases were adoption by users with a focus on monitoring looking for the best solution available, hyperscale users, and companies redoing there monitoring infrastructure.

What’s that all about?

The CNCF is a sub-foundation of the Linux Foundation and aims to “create and drive the adoption of a new computing paradigm that is optimized for modern distributed systems environments capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self healing multi-tenant nodes”. Members include companies such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, Docker, SAP, and VMware.

At the moment the foundation fosters fifteen incubation and eight sandbox projects, some of which even fit the same purpose – containerd and rkt, for example, are both container runtimes. In the past this has been justified by the urge to champion different approaches.

To graduate, a project has to have committers from at least two organization, must follow and maintain best practices laid down by the Core Infrastructure initiative and been awarded the corresponding badge, adopt the CNCF’s Code of Conduct, define a governance and committer process, have a public list of project adopters, and receive a supermajority vote from the technical oversight committee to move to graduation stage. Projects are normally expected to graduate within two years.