KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018

Prometheus is an excellent monitoring solution, however it is designed to store all metrics on one host in one set of files, which limits scalability and availability.

This talk provides an overview of Cortex, an Open Source project proposed for donation to the CNCF, which takes metrics from multiple Prometheus instances and stores them in a NoSQL database.

Outline:
- Microservices architecture of Cortex
- NoSQL back-end (DynamoDB, Bigtable or Cassandra)
- Fault-tolerance via DHT-based ingestion tier and stateless query tier
- Deployment via Kubernetes
- Architectural comparison to projects in the same area, such as Thanos and M3
- Lessons learned from operating “Prometheus as a service” for two years