Proposal sky-walking APM to join the CNCF

[wu-sheng]

Hi CNCF TOC,
I am @wu-sheng. I want to proposal the sky-walking to join the CNCF hosted projects. This is a project, I found two years ago, from Chinese open source community, hosted it in github since 2015, and now the team want it to join CNCF.

Skywalking is an APM, Application Performance Monitoring, for distributed system, and also definitely a distributed tracing system. I am a member and contributor of OpenTracing, and also an OTIAB member of OpenTracing. So in 2016, I have brought the sky-walking into the OpenTracing Supported Tracer list. And @bhs knows a lot stories about me and sky-walking with OpenTracing Community. Also contribute a little things for openmessage @vongosling

I am also an envanglist of OpenTracing:

• Provided and maintain formal zh (Chinese) translation of the opentracing/specification: https://github.com/opentracing-contrib/opentracing-specification-zh
• Gave the speeches about introducing CNCF and OpenTracing twice this year at Qcon Beijing 2017 and CNUTCon Shanghai 2017.
• Brought Motan, Hprose RPC Frameworks into OpenTracing Supported framework list.

Skywalking, today, has nearly 1.3K star, 400+ forks, 2300+ commits, 16 releases in GitHub. And has nearly 20 contributors. At early days of the project, some people doesn't contribute features from github, so I make a list on README.

Skywalking is a very special, and even unique big open source project in China community. We have no company background, just started and developed in the open source community only. All the PMC members(@wu-sheng @pengys5, @ascrutae) and contributors dedicate a lot of energy, time, enthusiasm for this project.

As an APM, skywalking provided these features:

• Dynamic topological graph of application clusters relationship. Based on tracing Spring Cloud, Dubbo(Alibaba), Motan(Sina) and many RPC frameworks. Check the supported list here: https://github.com/wu-sheng/sky-walking/wiki/3.2-supported-list
• Distributed Tracing, of course. Support auto instrumentation and manual instrumentation(OpenTracing API and Skywalking Annotation). I think we are the only open source project support them in the same
  tracing context, interop with each other, only instana support this in their commercial product.
• Dynamic service relationship, or dependency tree.
• JVM metrics. We are now a Java APM, so JVM metrics are very important. We also create a view including these metrics and TPS/ResponseTime in a time line, in order to help users to find out whether the JVM metrics influence the performance or not. This is the only feature related to JVM-platform.

You can see the screenshots about these features in our README page.

Skywalking built for Cloud Native applications, specially for docker-based env.

• In that env, the IP/hostname from OS is not the ip/name used for providing services, e.g. use service mesh like linkerd. Skywalking can adapt and work well.
• In our project, we provided Java auto instrumentation agent, at the same time we also provided gRPC and RESTful service to integrate other agent from communities. I have confirmed, people used PHP, golang agents, and working(interop) with our java agent to monitor their system.

@terrymanu 's dangdang.com team are using skywalking for their container based and multi languages system.

These companies are using skywalking for their OSS:

• dangdang.com Top level e-commerce china. (NYSE:DANG)
• China Unicom Telecom System(WIP)
• 数人云, https://www.shurenyun.com/
• Asisinfo, http://www.asiainfo.com/
• Tydic, https://www.tydic.com/
• 印记, http://www.yinjiyun.cn/
• 中数智慧, https://www.bidata.com.cn/
• vbill, https://www.vbill.cn/

BTW, the project is licensed by GPLv3, and in my personal repository. We can discuss the details later. The GPLv3 protected our project in early days, if we can join the CNCF, I am sure that Apache 2.0 is OK for our PMC members and contributors.

These people of other projects you can ask about our project:

• @bhs OpenTracing
• @adriancole Zipkin
• @WillemJiang Apache member and Huawei open source project team leader
• @vongosling Apache Rocketmq Team Leader&Co creator, Linux openmessage initiator
• @terrymanu Dangdang Architecture Director

At last, I truely hope we can bring skywalking, the most popular open source APM in China, into CNCF.

[terrymanu]

DangDang use sky-walking to do APM collect and remote call tracing analyze. Sky-walking can collect information for java automatically and can support every language by manually collect. Sky-walking has a beautiful picture to analyze and draw system dependencies diagram, the collector can scale out wonderful. We like to use it, it is a good solution for APM.

[caniszczyk]

Thanks @wu-sheng, the first step in the process is to have a presentation about SkyWalking if the @cncf/toc thinks its appropriate to invite you to present about the project (if its a fit for CNCF). The GPLv3 license would be a deal breaker, so it's great to hear you're considering the ALv2

https://github.com/cncf/toc#scheduled-community-presentations

[wu-sheng]

@caniszczyk Glad to have your reply. I am aware of the presentation from @bhs. What should I prepare for the presentation? I checked your presentations, October 17 is the only free day in 2017, can we do the presentation at that day?

As I said, if we pass your review/presentation, I will change the license to Apache 2.0 directly. The skywalking PMC has voted, passed, before I submit this proposal. Is this good enough for you and cncf?

btw, if I can do the presentation online, I want to test the network first.

[duffqiu]

Thanks @wu-sheng is helping us to apply apm system for our financial customer. That Skywalking follows OpenTracing is most attractive feature for us to choose it. We are trying to use Skywalking for Springcloud microservice framework and our message based micro service framework. Our customers really love it because it provides the good idea how to track system's performance issues with low efforts.

BTW, it is good news if the license is changed to Apache 2.

[caniszczyk]

@wu-sheng, we were planning to discuss this at the next TOC call (Oct 3rd), it's up to you whether you want to still leave this open for discussion

[wu-sheng]

Sure. I am reopening this.

[wu-sheng]

we were planning to discuss this at the next TOC call (Oct 3rd)

@caniszczyk Does Oct 3rd mean the third week of Oct? Do we need to attend the meeting?

[caniszczyk]

Oct 3rd simply means the TOC will decide whether to invite the project for a presentation or not, you're welcome to attend the meeting but not required

On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 8:19 PM 吴晟 Wu Sheng ***@***.***> wrote: we were planning to discuss this at the next TOC call (Oct 3rd) @caniszczyk <https://github.com/caniszczyk> Does Oct 3rd mean the third week of Oct? Do we need to attend the meeting? — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#50 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAD5IQ-vzTXkk4al7c8Rg7vEAPIFzX7Rks5smb7KgaJpZM4PgWCU> .

-- Cheers, Chris Aniszczyk http://aniszczyk.org +1 512 961 6719

[wu-sheng]

Oct 3rd simply means the TOC will decide whether to invite the project for
a presentation or not, you're welcome to attend the meeting but not
required

@caniszczyk I see. Thanks. Where can I find the link to the meeting? I suppose it is an online meeting, right?

[caniszczyk]

@wu-sheng https://github.com/cncf/toc#meeting-time

[wu-sheng]

@caniszczyk I have already contributed wu-sheng/sky-walking project to OpenSkywalking Oragnization, and the new repository is https://github.com/OpenSkywalking/skywalking

And this project is under APLv2 License.

[wu-sheng]

@caniszczyk Do you have any news for us about the TOC meeting?

[wu-sheng]

Sheng would have to present this to the TOC if he wants it to be considered in the CNCF.

@caniszczyk I got your reply from @bhs . So can you settle an arrangement about our presentation? When should I do that?

[caniszczyk]

@wu-sheng, shoot me an email at cra at linuxfoundation.org, I can start helping you put together a presentation deck. We may have room Dec 5th or we can do it in early January.

Will you happen to be at kubecon in December by any chance?

[wu-sheng]

@caniszczyk Already sent you the mail. My mail is wu.sheng at foxmail.com

[wu-sheng]

I am closing this proposal.