Added Proposal for advancing Thanos to the Incubation Stage 🎉

proposals/thanos-incubation.md

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+# Thanos Incubation Stage Proposal
+
+During Thanos presentation at the [CNCF TOC meeting on 7/9/2019](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jhzJlSAAJNNil1nIYp60eSMH3LPd6AwqHLt3vEAzMSg/edit#slide=id.g5cdf155fc3_0_4)
+we were suggested by TOC members to apply straight for [the Incubation Stage](https://github.com/cncf/toc/blob/master/process/graduation_criteria.adoc#incubating-stage).
+We all agreed back then that we will join Sandbox first and after that perform Due Diligence required for the Incubation Stage. 
+
+This proposal aims to address the Diligence requirements.
+
+As the Thanos team, we believe we are ready to be considered joining Incubation Stage.
+
+## Incubation State Requirements
+
+1. *Document that it is being used successfully in production by at least three independent end users which, in the TOC’s judgement, are of adequate quality and scope.*
+
+Thanos has a large number of successful adopters that are running Thanos on production. 
+Some of those who choose to speak publicly about their usage, we can see in the list of public adopters on our website [https://thanos.io/](https://thanos.io/).
+Some of them decided to go beyond that and shared publicly about their successes with Thanos:
+
+* [Improbable](https://improbable.io) [started Thanos](https://improbable.io/blog/thanos-prometheus-at-scale)
+and were using the project on the production from the earliest days. [This blog post](https://improbable.io/blog/thanos-architecture-at-improbable)
+describes the usage in detail here.
+* [Monzo](https://monzo.com/) is UK’s banking startup that was one of the earliest adopters and contributors to Thanos. 
+They described their success in detail [in this blog post](https://monzo.com/blog/2018/07/27/how-we-monitor-monzo).
+* [uSwitch](https://www.uswitch.com/) shared their expierience [on Medium](https://medium.com/uswitch-labs/making-prometheus-more-awesome-with-thanos-fbec8c6c28ad).
+* [Alibaba Cloud](https://us.alibabacloud.com/) presented their usage of Thanos during CNCF KubeCon China 2019. Video is available [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS6zMksfipc).
+* [Red Hat](https://www.redhat.com/) is using Thanos in production. One of the usages was described [here](https://blog.openshift.com/federated-prometheus-with-thanos-receive/). 
+* [HelloFresh](https://engineering.hellofresh.com/) and their blog post about the Thanos usage is available [here](https://engineering.hellofresh.com/monitoring-at-hellofresh-part-1-architecture-677b4bd6b728). 
+* [Taboola](https://engineering.taboola.com/) shared their story too [here](https://engineering.taboola.com/monitoring-and-metering-scale/).
+* [Banzai Cloud](https://banzaicloud.com/) recently shared their production usage of Thanos in a multi-cluster environment in [this blog post](https://banzaicloud.com/blog/multi-cluster-monitoring/).
+They also maintain a [Thanos helm chart](https://github.com/banzaicloud/banzai-charts/tree/master/thanos).
+
+2. *Have a healthy number of committers. A committer is defined as someone with the commit bit; i.e., someone who can accept contributions to some or all of the project.*
+
+We have 7 maintainers, 4 triage members, overall from 8 different companies. The details are here: https://thanos.io/maintainers/
+
+3. *Demonstrate a substantial ongoing flow of commits and merged contributions.*
+
+Commits per week over the last 6 months: **28**
+
+![](https://github.com/bwplotka/toc/blob/pics/proposals/thanos-commits.png?raw=true)
+
+Issue Opened/Closed per week over the last 6 months: **22.29**
+
+![](https://github.com/bwplotka/toc/blob/pics/proposals/thanos-openedclosedissues.png?raw=true)
+
+New PRs per week over the last 6 months: **18**
+
+![](https://github.com/bwplotka/toc/blob/pics/proposals/thanos-prs.png?raw=true)
+
+All data was gathered thanks to [CNCF devstats dashboards](https://thanos.devstats.cncf.io/d/8/dashboards?orgId=1&from=now-6M&to=now-1h)
+
+4. *A clear versioning scheme.*
+
+We have regular releases every 6 weeks with dedicated Release Shepherd for each. All is documented [here](https://thanos.io/release-process.md/).
+
+Release cadence and the process is very similar to the [Graduated CNCF Prometheus project](https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/blob/master/RELEASE.md) in order to reuse the best practices.
+Additionally, it is convenient and familiar for Prometheus Ecosystem Community.
+
+## What is Thanos: Recap
+
+Thanos is a metric system that aims for being a simple and cheap option to centralize and scale-out the Prometheus based systems.
+Those goals did not change since the [Sandbox proposal](https://github.com/cncf/toc/pull/256) and Thanos still achieves all of this by:
+
+* Gradual and incremental installation model. Users can seamlessly transform vanilla Prometheus system into partial Thanos, optionally upgrade into fully-fledged Thanos deployment with near-unlimited retention capabilities in separate isolated steps.
+* Single, widely available, cheap and optional dependency: object storage.
+* Built-in Prometheus HA support and downsampling capabilities.
+* Flexible deployment model due to a cloud-native, microservice approach using gRPC.
+
+Concretely the aims of the project are:
+
+* Global query view of metrics.
+* Unlimited retention of metrics, including downsampling.
+* High availability of components, including support for Prometheus HA.
+
+## Statement on alignment with the CNCF mission:
+
+The Thanos project aligns well with the mission of the CNCF by empowering organizations to build, run and monitor applications at scale.
+
+It can be used to monitor and alert on microservices and infrastructure that spans over not only multiple clusters but over multiple clouds with a simple approach to adoption and scaling.
+
+Thanos aims to enable people to take their current Prometheus ecosystem and scale it out beyond their current capabilities, gradually and without downtime.
+
+Building on top of the work that is being done by the Prometheus community we can scale out to give Thanos users a global view of all their metrics without the need for aggregations.
+
+## Comparison to Cortex
+
+Cortex is another CNCF project that provides high-availability and long-term storage to Prometheus. Both Thanos and Cortex make different trade-offs that will appeal to different use-cases. Thanos approached the problem with the focus on simplicity, cost efficiency, and gradual installation. It takes advantage of having only a single dependency (object storage), single stable API (StoreAPI) and is integrating with Prometheus via both pull and push-based methods. 
+
+On the other hand, Cortex is more mature and has more performance optimizations focused to reduce the latency for complex metric queries. It has also better multitenancy support.
+
+It’s worth to note that Cortex and Thanos’s communities are **constantly collaborating with each other**, the recent ones
+being using the cortex-frontend to provide query caching for Thanos and exploration of writing blocks and using the Thanos query path in Cortex.
+Example: [Thanos PR](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/pull/1881), [Cortex PR](https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex/pull/1942). There are plans to collaborate further and the community and usage of both the projects are only growing!
+
+## Project Progress since Sandbox
+
+* Improved documentation accordingly to the [CII Best Practices](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1389).
+* We agreed on our [Thanos Governance](https://thanos.io/governance.md/). We are also one of the first projects which
+applied *the rule of maximum 2 votes from a single company* to ensure the project independence.
+* All key metrics around contributions, downloads and committers have seen significantly grown.
+* Thanos being officially incorporated by [several new customers](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/commits/master/website/static/logos). Unofficially by even more based on spoken feedback.
+* Three more [maintainers](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/commits/master/MAINTAINERS.md) joined.
+* The project has seen an increase in integrations e.g: Memcached support, new object storage implementations, tracing backends.
+* Major improvements in stability and resource consumption were done. Some of them were done with collaboration with Prometheus and Cortex projects,
+**which proves why open source is amazing!**
+* Thanos participates in both the Google Summer of Code and Community Bridge 
+
+## Community Bridge
+
+We applied to the Community Bridge program with various tasks for Thanos project. Details can be found [here](https://people.communitybridge.org/project/f51284ab-f652-47b1-9819-cd4135e75c00).
+
+We are currently mentoring one developer from India within this program and she has already contributed significantly to the Thanos project.
+
+## Google Summer of Code
+
+We plan to apply for GSoC as well, we will submit the task there as well before deadline.
+
+## Features & Roadmap
+
+Following is a list of features we plan to add in next iterations with the help of the community.
+The list is also available in updated form via [GitHub milestones](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/projects).
+
+* [Move tracing to OpenTelemetry.](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1972)
+ * Purpose: Reuse and stability.
+* [Improve loading blocks with binary format and mmap.](https://thanos.io/proposals/201912_thanos_binary_index_header.md/)
+ * Purpose: Lower memory footprint of Store Gateway, faster startup
+* [Contribute to Cortex Query-frontend to make response cache work better against Thanos.](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1651)
+ * Purpose: Consistency and resilience of the caching layer, downsampling support.
+* [LabelNames and LabelValues time range limit.](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1811)
+ * Purpose: Lower memory usage of Store Gateway, lower latency of LabelValues/LabelNames requests
+* [Request logging](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1706) 
+ * Purpose: Query audit, debuggability for slow queries, matching trace to request
+* [Native gRPC certificate rotation & mTLS everything.](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/pull/1672)
+ * Purpose: Security, Simpler on-prem installation
+* [Adhoc e2e Benchmark for Thanos](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1707)
+ * Purpose: Confidence in optimizations we do in the upstream
+* [Race-free compactions](https://thanos.io/proposals/201901-read-write-operations-bucket.md/)
+ * Purpose: Consistency and data correctness during various operations, support for eventual consistency buckets.
+ * **Proposed for community bridge and the first task**
+* [Offline deduplication](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1014)
+ * Purpose: Saves resources per request on Store and Querier, 
+* [Query limits against OOMs e.g series limits](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/448)
+ * Purpose: Reliability
+* [Compaction bucket web UI](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1657)
+ * Purpose: Debuggability
+* [Deletions](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1598)
+ * Purpose: GDPR, removing broken series, retention per series
+* [Get Receive component out of experimental stage](https://github.com/thanos-io/thanos/issues/1093)
+ * Purpose: Reliability, Multitenancy, Usability for community