Looking for a new maintainer #735
Description
All good things come to an end.
History
Fabio started as a small 350 line load-balancing experiment during my time at eBay in Amsterdam to replace our insane load-balancer setup and worked much, much better than I expected. It made routing dirt simple and pushed the responsibility for the route to the service instead of coordinating releases between micro-services and the DevOps team.
It also hit some sweet spot for the HashiCorp Consul users which now had a super-simple consul-enabled load balancer and HashiCorp noticed very quickly.
This was 2015, with go1.5 and consul 0.7. My team was the largest Go team in Amsterdam and to the best of my knowledge we were the only ones running large scale, big money, production critical stuff on Go. Very exciting times.
Fabio would have probably never seen the light of open-source, if there wouldn't have been @emilevauge with https://github.com/containous/traefik and my colleagues pushing me to open-source Fabio. I got mocked for the choice of name (b/c of the italian actor) but that died off quite quickly when the Github stars were flying in. Emile and I even met briefly during a Go conference in Paris where I presented the project for a couple of minutes. Fun times and some healthy competition ;)
I've added features that were helpful to us and others. Was involved in long-winded discussions in what should and should not be in the project and probably neglected to build a more active community of committers around the project. Maintaining an open-source project is a lot of work. It does not get easier if it becomes somewhat successful.
For a long time Fabio had a leg on HAProxy because of reloads without restarts. For an even longer time it had one on Traefik because of the TCP proxy with SNI support. (traefik/traefik#933). I remember writing that code, forking the Go TLS code and getting something working in a couple of lines which was so useful.
You are all awesome!
Joyent added features to Fabio like the grpc-proxy and countless contributors have found bugs, workarounds, fixes, features, improvements and the project has become bigger and more successful than I could have ever imagined.
With 10 million Docker pulls Fabio seems to be driving some serious websites. I got insane performance numbers with Fabio running on a 24-core machine from some companies where Fabio replaced an expensive load-balancer for free.
But times change, @emilevauge went ahead and built @containous around traefik, HAproxy can handle reloads without restarts and Caddy with the awesome auto-TLS came along.
I've got an offer to turn Fabio into a company and turned it down, then worked for HashiCorp for a while and left again, now working full time on batteries and injecting Go into the industrial manufacturing industry.
I've moved on - mentally - and also in terms of my commitment. Without the extraordinary help of @leprechau and @pschultz over the last year the project would be in much worse shape.
I think it is time to let go and find a new maintainer. If we can't find one then this project needs to go to the software graveyard.
I've never done this before so I'm curious who would be interested and what to look out for.
Thank you all!!!
Frank Schröder/@magiconair