Merge pull request #301 from prometheus/one-year-post

Blog post about 1-year announcement anniversary.

content/blog/2016-01-26-one-year-of-open-prometheus-development.md

+---
+title: One Year of Open Prometheus Development
+created_at: 2016-01-26
+kind: article
+author_name: Julius Volz
+---
+
+## The beginning
+
+A year ago today, we officially announced Prometheus to the wider world. This
+is a great opportunity for us to look back and share some of the wonderful
+things that have happened to the project since then. But first, let's start at
+the beginning.
+
+Although we already started Prometheus as an open-source project on GitHub in
+2012, we didn't make noise about it at first. We wanted to give the project
+time to mature and be able to experiment without friction. Prometheus was
+gradually introduced for production monitoring at
+[SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/) in 2013 and then saw more and more
+usage within the company, as well as some early adoption by our friends at
+Docker and Boexever in 2014. Over the years, Prometheus was growing more and
+more mature and although it was already solving people's monitoring problems,
+it was still unknown to the wider public.
+
+## Going public
+
+Everything changed for us a year ago, in January of 2015. After more than two
+years of development and internal usage, we felt that Prometheus was ready for
+a wider audience and decided to go fully public with our official [announcement
+blog post](https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog/prometheus-monitoring-at-soundcloud),
+a [website](http://prometheus.io/), and a series of
+[related](http://www.boxever.com/tags/monitoring)
+[posts](http://5pi.de/2015/01/26/monitor-docker-containers-with-prometheus/).
+We already received a good deal of attention during the first week after the
+announcement, but nothing could prepare us for what happened a week later:
+someone unknown to us (hello there,
+[jjwiseman](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jjwiseman)!) had submitted
+[the Prometheus website](http://prometheus.io/) to Hacker News and somehow their
+post had made it [all the way to the top](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8995696).
+
+This is when things started going slightly crazy in a good way. We saw a sharp
+rise in contributors, mailing list questions, GitHub issues, IRC visitors,
+requests for conference and meetup talks, and increasing buzz on the net in
+general. Since the beginning, we have been very lucky about the quality of our
+newly expanded community: The kind of people who were attracted to Prometheus
+also turned out to be very competent, constructive, and high-quality
+contributors and users. The ideal open-source scenario of receiving a lot of
+value back from the community was a reality pretty much from day one.
+
+What does all that Hacker News buzz look like in terms of GitHub stars? Try and
+see if you can find the exact moment in this graph (ironically, a Gnuplot and
+not Prometheus graph) when we went out of "dark mode" and got hit by Hacker
+News:
+
+[![Prometheus GitHub stars](/assets/prometheus_github_stars.png)](/assets/prometheus_github_stars.png)
+
+This attention also put us in the 4th place of GitHub's trending repositories
+worldwide:
+
+[![Prometheus trending on GitHub](/assets/prometheus_github_trending.png)](/assets/prometheus_github_trending.png)
+
+## After the first wave
+
+After those first weeks, the initial onslaught of incoming communication cooled
+down a bit, but we were and still are receiving constantly growing adoption.
+
+To give you an idea of the ecosystem, we now have:
+
+- 33 repositories in our GitHub organization
+- ~4800 total GitHub stars
+- 200+ contributors
+- 2300+ pull requests (60+ open)
+- 1100+ issues (300+ open)
+- 150+ people in our IRC channel (`#prometheus` on [FreeNode](http://freenode.net/))
+- 250+ people on the mailing list who have created 300+ threads
+- 20+ Prometheus-related talks and workshops
+- 100+ articles and blog posts
+
+Besides countless smaller features and bug fixes to existing projects, the
+community has contributed many projects of their own to the Prometheus
+ecosystem. Most of them are exporters that translate metrics from existing
+systems into Prometheus's data model, but there have also been important
+additions to Prometheus itself, such as service discovery mechanisms for
+[Kubernetes](http://kubernetes.io/),
+[Marathon](https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/) and
+[EC2](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/).
+
+Shortly after making more noise about Prometheus, we also found one contributor
+([Fabian](https://github.com/fabxc)) so outstanding that he ended up joining
+SoundCloud to work on Prometheus. He has since become the most active developer
+on the project and we have him to thank for major new features such as
+generalized service discovery support, runtime-reloadable configurations, new
+powerful query language features, a custom-built query parser, and so much
+more. He is currently working on the new beta rewrite of the
+[Alertmanager](https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager).
+
+Finally, we have been honored to be recognized and adopted by major players in
+the industry. [Google](https://www.google.com) is now instrumenting its open-source
+container management system [Kubernetes](http://kubernetes.io/) natively with
+Prometheus metrics. [CoreOS](https://coreos.com/) is picking it up for
+[etcd](https://coreos.com/etcd/)'s monitoring as well. [DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/) is betting on Prometheus for their
+internal monitoring. By now, the list of companies using Prometheus in one way
+or another has become too long to mention all of them:
+[Google](https://www.google.com),
+[CoreOS](https://coreos.com/), [Docker](https://docker.com),
+[Boxever](http://www.boxever.com/),
+[DigitalOcean](https://www.digitalocean.com/), [Financial Times](http://www.ft.com/),
+[Improbable](http://improbable.io/), [KPMG](https://kpmg.com), and many more.
+Even the world's largest digital festival,
+[DreamHack](https://www.dreamhack.se), has [used
+Prometheus](http://prometheus.io/blog/2015/06/24/monitoring-dreamhack/) to keep
+tabs on their network infrastructure in 2015, and
+[FOSDEM](https://fosdem.org/2016/) will do so in 2016.
+
+The widely popular dashboard builder [Grafana](http://grafana.org/) also added
+native Prometheus backend support in [version
+2.5](http://grafana.org/blog/2015/10/28/Grafana-2-5-Released.html). Since
+people all around the world are already using and loving Grafana, we are going
+to focus on improving Grafana's Prometheus integration and will invest
+less energy in our own dashboard builder
+[PromDash](https://github.com/prometheus/promdash) in the future.
+
+With the Prometheus ecosystem continuing to grow, the first users have started
+asking about commercial support. While Prometheus will always remain an
+independent open source project, one of our core contributors ([Brian
+Brazil](https://github.com/brian-brazil)) has recently founded his own company,
+[Robust Perception](http://www.robustperception.io/), which provides support
+and consulting services around Prometheus and monitoring in general.
+
+On a lighter note, 2015 has also been the year in which Brian proved Prometheus's query
+language to be Turing complete by implementing
+[Conway's Game of Life in PromQL](http://www.robustperception.io/conways-life-in-prometheus/).
+
+## The road ahead
+
+Both personally and technically, we are really excited about what has happened
+last year in Prometheus-land. We love the opportunity to provide the world with
+a powerful new approach to monitoring, especially one that is much better
+suited towards modern cloud- and container-based infrastructures than
+traditional solutions. We are also very grateful to all contributors and
+hope to continuously improve Prometheus for everyone.
+
+Although Prometheus is relatively mature by now, we have a list of major goals
+we want to tackle in 2016. The highlights will be polishing the new
+Alertmanager rewrite, supporting full read and write integration for external
+long-term storage, as well as eventually releasing a stable 1.0 version of the
+Prometheus server itself.
+
+Stay tuned!