A new documentary film partly set in Detroit by Speakeasy Productions, “Inside Prometheus: An Open Source System That Changed Technology,” gives 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 a system that improves the tech industry’s ability to monitor applications that power everything from e-commerce sites to databases.
The documentary gives viewers a firsthand look into the development of the Prometheus open source project, providing 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, including Detroit, 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,” says 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 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,” says 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.
The film was made possible by technology providers and community leaders at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Chronosphere, Google, Honeypot.io, and Red Hat.
“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,” says Sean Cohen, director of product management, hybrid platforms, at Red Hat in Detroit.
To learn more and view the documentary, visit here.
Speakeasy Productions, a division of Speakeasy Strategies, seeks to empower technology companies and open source communities by showcasing their stories and highlighting core open source projects and back-end developers.
