The Prometheus Conformance Program

Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021

2021-10-14

Authors: Richard Hartmann

Summary

The presentation discusses the launch of a certification program called Conformance, Compliance, and Compatibility for Prometheus, which aims to incentivize companies to contribute more to the project and ensure compatibility among different components.

The Conformance, Compliance, and Compatibility certification program for Prometheus aims to ensure compatibility among different components and incentivize companies to contribute more to the project.
The program requires companies or projects to sign paperwork with CNCF binding themselves to follow the guidelines of the certification program.
Companies or projects can self-test and submit results to get a time-limited permission to use the certification mark.
The program aims to unlock more contributions to Prometheus and give tech people an official reference to self-test and figure out if things are good.
The initial cadence is aggressive, and the program needs at least three companies and all projects to sign up initially.
The program is not a hard requirement, but CNCF would like to have more companies and projects to sign up.
The program incentivizes companies with money and gives them an official reference to self-test and figure out if things are good.

The speaker mentioned that the program aims to block the creative use of words by some market players who immediately got quite creative in how they were using words. By hogging all the words, the program ensures that companies cannot play games with them anymore because they are well-defined within the scheme of the conformance program. The program also aims to incentivize companies to contribute more to Prometheus, and hopefully, unlock more contributions within companies. The speaker also mentioned that the program is effective in incentivizing companies because history has shown that it works for CNCF.

Abstract

Prometheus is the standard for cloud-native metric monitoring and beyond. We're a victim of our own success inasmuch as everyone claims to be compatible with Prometheus when many are not. In the best case, this leads to user confusion. In the worst case, this leads to data loss, data change, and missed alerts. In our experience as Prometheus team supporting end users, the latter is scarily common. To fix this situation, CNCF and Prometheus team have launched the Prometheus Conformance Program. We will walk through its design, through current test suites available, through current test results, and show you how to apply for the official mark of Prometheus compatibility. Depending on overall timeline, we might use this talk to publish official marks for projects and products.

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