The future of Promitor is community-driven

[tomkerkhove]

The future of Promitor is community-driven nowadays, as I do not have time to contribute code anymore.

Learn more in this blog post.

I am astonished how Promitor has evolved from an idea I had to an open-source product that is adopted by 160+ enterprises, doing 300 million requests per day. (based on the limited telemetry it offers)

Why are things changing?

Well... life happened - I became a proud father of 2 kiddos in the middle of a global pandemic, got a new job and did not need to use Promitor myself anymore.

That resulted in me having less available time to focus on Promitor and keep on evolving the product, although I definately wanted to do so. (for example support the new data-plane API)

What is changing?

Due to the reasons above, I am/have not been able to keep on contributing new features which may have been a point of frustration.

While I have been trying hard to fix this problem, I have to face the fact that I cannot solve it and have to go to a "external contributions" model where I am no longer able to contribute things myself.

Does this mean Promitor is deprecated? That will depend on how many external contributions are going to come in the next year:

• If there are few, I will officially deprecated and archive the project.
• If there are more and more contributors, I am happy to work with the community to transfer it to new maintainers inside the Promitor organization
  I will, however, still do releases for changes coming in when we have accumulated a decent amount of changes or a security patch was made.

How does this impact you?

In theory, nothing changes. However, it highly depends on how the community is going to contribute.

The best way, as a Promitor user, to ensure that it keeps on evolving is by making contributions to the project.

[gburton1]

Hi Tom, we at Axon answered this call over the past year and made some large contributions through hkfgo and locmai, with more coming. I'm hoping that you will keep the project alive and not deprecated! You can also consider training hkfgo to be a maintainer to relieve some of your burden.

https://github.com/tomkerkhove/promitor/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Ahkfgo
https://github.com/tomkerkhove/promitor/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Alocmai

I'm also hoping you can help me out right now. The main reason that my leadership gave me the leeway to make this big up-front investment in Promitor this year was to alleviate the Azure Resource Manager bottleneck. We finally got that big PR merged recently that switches to the batch API, but it would really help me out to get a release with that change along with some security fixes, so that I can deploy it and demonstrate the material value of all this work to my leadership.

Security fixes that need to be merged:
#2538
https://github.com/tomkerkhove/promitor/pull/2517/files

I realize your time is limited, so please propose anything that works for you to reach this objective (we are happy to help wherever possible). I think we might just be stuck on one last section of these docs: promitor/docs#65?

[tomkerkhove]

I can assure you, I don't want to disappoint existing end-users so will keep reviewing PRs. I've been slow lately but try to be faster. If you feel things are stuck, feel free to reach out to [email protected] as I may miss notifications or don't get them because of GitHub.

I am not planning on deprecating Promitor. And I highly appreciate the help of everyone.

I have been trying to cut a release but the tests are not allowing me as there are a test failures; but I have commented on the Batch API issue with an ask to have a look.

PS: What timezone are you in?

[gburton1]

Thank you! @hkfgo (Stephen) and I are in PST, and @locmai is in ICT (Vietnam).

[tomkerkhove]

Hm, that's what I was afraid of - I live in Belgium so am 9h ahead of @hkfgo. I was thinking of setting up a sync every now and then but that won't work timezone-wise.

To unblock triggering pipelines, I have added @hkfgo as contributor on the repo given the contributions he has done.

[tomkerkhove]

Once we sort out the flakiness of tests, we can cut the release.