Bartłomiej Płotka

Senior Software Engineer
Google

Building Sustainable Open Source: Seven Key Lessons After 5 Years of Leading The Thanos Project

Platform Engineering
Wednesday, February 8 • 1:45pm-2:25pm GMT
Fleming, 3rd Floor

Bartlomiej Plotka

Building Sustainable Open Source: Seven Key Lessons After 5 Years of Leading The Thanos Project

In late 2017, Bartek Płotka and Fabian Reinartz started a new open-source project, called “Thanos”, initially sponsored by a London startup. Born from a business need to scale Prometheus metrics cheaply in the cloud, Thanos has grown to be the most popular metric database in the CNCF landscape, with thousands of organizations using it. It has a vibrant community, team, and ongoing innovations despite no single company behind it and 5 years of history. In this talk, you will hear the untold story from Thanos co-founder and maintainer Bartłomiej Płotka, who will explain key factors that contributed to the success of Thanos (fun stories included!). The audience will learn what works when building sustainable open-source software and what to look for when evaluating investments in the open.

Bio

Bartek Płotka is a Senior Software Engineer at Google. SWE by heart, with an SRE background, currently working on Cloud Observability. Previously Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. Author of “Efficient Go” book with O’Reilly. As the co-founder of the CNCF Thanos project and core maintainer of various open-source projects, including Prometheus, he enjoys building OSS communities and maintainable, reliable distributed systems, ideally in Go. CNCF Ambassador and the CNCF TAG Observability Technical Lead.