DETROIT--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Speakeasy Productions announced today the launch of “Inside Prometheus: An Open Source System That Changed Technology,” a documentary film that give viewers an inside look at the journey from creation to mass adoption of one of the fastest-growing open source frameworks in the world. Prometheus is the invisible force that vastly improves the tech industry's ability to monitor applications that power everything from e-commerce sites to databases.
This compelling documentary gives viewers a firsthand look into the development of the Prometheus open source project, providing unique insight into how it became a game-changer in the open source industry and utilized by hundreds of thousands of developers and companies across the globe. The film features prominent pioneers, executives and engineers from the Prometheus and open source communities, who provide the origin story of one of the highest-velocity open source projects ever created.
“Technologies change how we live and work, and the most important innovations in today’s computing world are often invisible to the everyday user. The rise of the Prometheus project is a perfect example of that,” said Josiah McGarvie, filmmaker and director of Inside Prometheus. “The power of film, and the benefits of storytelling, drive understanding, adoption, and participation, and we expect to see commercial uptake as a result. We’re proud to bring this open source innovation story to everyone with the hopes of inspiring even more technology advancements.”
The Prometheus open source project collects and stores metrics that enable the monitoring of applications with the goal of making them faster and more efficient. Work on it started in 2012 to solve the emerging problem of a lack of proper monitoring tools for modern software stacks. Without proper monitoring, companies lack visibility into how to adjust or fix applications to improve performance. A team of engineers at SoundCloud created an open source monitoring system to better discover system failures and outages. Overcoming the daunting task of building a new monitoring system from scratch, the team created what would eventually become the Prometheus open source project and joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in 2016.
“Creating this film was both a labor of love and a chance to give back and help the project build and sustain its community and attract new contributors,” said Chad Torbin, Executive Producer and founder of Speakeasy Strategies, an international public relations agency that represents developer-led companies. “An active and supportive community is the heart of any open-source project but great code is not always enough to bring developers to a project or build that community. With films like this, we hope to inspire the next generation of project founders and amplify the untold stories of their impact on shaping technology. Prometheus is one of those special projects we aim to support, with more documentary films to come.”
Inside Prometheus: An Open Source System That Changed Technology debuted at the PrometheusDay North America event co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 in Detroit, Michigan.
The film was made possible by technology providers and community leaders at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Chronosphere, Google, Honeypot.io and Red Hat.
To learn more and view the documentary, please visit the film website here.
To participate or sponsor in our next documentary film based on the origins and journey of Envoy open source project, please contact sponsorship@speakeasystrategies.com
Contributor Quotes
“As the second project to join the CNCF, Prometheus rose to be a game-changing technology that helped shape everything around modern monitoring and observability. The project’s journey provides an inspiring story of how developers tackled the daunting task of creating new open source systems and succeeded. We’re excited to work with the community to showcase their incredible journey from an end user-driven project to one of the most prolific open source projects in the world,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
"As an early adopter of Prometheus, we saw how impactful the technology had the potential to be to cloud-native development. We are excited Red Hat was able to be a small part of this documentary sharing how developers came together to create an open source project that became the critical technology it is today,” said Sean Cohen, Director of Product Management, Hybrid Platforms, Red Hat.
"I’m most thankful to be part of a project that honors the crucial role Prometheus has played in the technology industry," said Rob Skillington, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Chronosphere. "This documentary captures the essence of what makes Prometheus so important, including the collaboration of a group of engineers from many organizations intent on building a standard set of end-to-end monitoring interfaces that defines the de-facto approach to monitoring cloud native systems. With Prometheus now so pervasive, it will be fascinating to see what the future holds - especially as the industry continues to push for standardized interfaces to interoperate with each other using open source tools and frameworks as fundamental building blocks."
“Since 2018 Honeypot has been producing video documentaries about open-source projects like Vue.js, GraphQL, Elixir or Ember.js. The feedback on these documentaries is incredible and has even earned Honeypot and its content platform `.cult´ the reputation of `Netflix for developers.’ The Prometheus documentary is the next highlight in this series of elaborate productions which showcase the diversity of the developer community, their work and their lives. It shines a light on the people behind the digital applications we use every day: On the hundreds of lines of code, bug fixes and hours of work,” said Imke Schultjan, Managing Director at Honeypot, Europe’s developer-focused job platform.
About Speakeasy Productions
Speakeasy Productions, a division of Speakeasy Strategies, is on a mission to empower technology companies and open source communities to showcase their stories of the unsung technology heroes who are changing the way we live and work. Through the development and production of documentary films, we aim to demystify core open source projects and the world of back-end developers to move them out of the shadows and forward into the hearts and minds of millions.
