[Week — 00] Gearing up with Thanos

The triplets!

This post is a part of the series of my journal for spending my summers with Thanos. I would try to document my learnings and little tidbits of how I approached my project and any shortcomings that I would try to overcome in future time 😃

Special thanks to my mentors Bartłomiej Płotka and Kemal Akkoyun for mentoring me on working on a project under them. I am looking forward to an exciting summer with them!

Selection with Thanos

Thanos is an Open source, highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities. Before you start questioning what is Prometheus and what problem does Thanos solve, let me answer -

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at Soundcloud.

I heard about Thanos from a few of my college seniors, and while I was learning more about distributed systems, I stumbled upon CNCF, and how it provides a plethora of solutions for hosting applications on the cloud. Learning something practically comes from doing things, so I thought of implementing all of my learnings through contributing to an open-source project.

I was trying to appreciate each of the solutions provided by CNCF, and the monitoring and observability aspect really impressed me. This is how I landed up with Thanos and equipped with a warm and helpful community, I am excited to work with Thanos!

I also read through Khyati’s blog-post about Thanos, so I would highly recommend it.

Starting with Thanos

I started contributing to Thanos with some documentation PRs. I was impressed by the abundance of YouTube conference videos about Thanos and Prometheus, and totally understood the ‘what’ problem that Thanos and Prometheus are trying to solve. Here is a video resource to get started with Thanos and Prometheus.

Documentation ftw!

I sent in a couple of documentation PRs and coupled with some PR reviews, I was up and running with Thanos!

Further thoughts

I was not able to be productive as I would have loved to be, because of the recent cyclone Amphan in Kolkata. While I was fortunate that my electricity was still up, my internet connectivity took a hit, and I have been barely able to connect with the outside world. I was also supposed to have a meet up with the other mentees, but due to bad connectivity, I had to drop the idea.

My connection has been better by the end of the week, so I guess I would be able to start with my work the next week without any issues.

I am looking forward to a meetup with my mentors and discuss my understandings and chalk out the plan for the project.

Until then, Ciao Adios!