Building a Community - How Cortex Went from a Vendor Project to a Community

Explore the journey of Cortex from a vendor-driven project to a thriving open-source community in this 29-minute conference talk. Discover how the project evolved since joining the CNCF, focusing on building a vibrant ecosystem. Learn about key changes implemented, including improved documentation, the introduction of a single binary and blocks engine, and regular communication through blog posts and social media. Gain insights into the importance of weekly calls, end-user conference talks, and collaboration with sibling projects like Thanos and Prometheus. Understand the strategies that led to a 5x increase in community activity, maintainers from five different companies, and adoption by international banks, Fortune 50 enterprises, and startups alike.

Syllabus

Intro
The Cortex Project • Horizontally Scalable Multitenant Prometheus
Docs are important • Create a website for the project
Cortex single binary and blocks engine!
Make some noise! • Write regular blogposts and share them on social media (Twitter) New features, releases, performance improvements!
Closely? • Weekly calls to see if things are working well.
End user conference talks! • End user talks maintainer / vendor talks.