The popular telemetry agent announces 13 billion downloads as adoption grows
Today at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Paris, the Fluent community announced the release of Fluent Bit v3, which includes several new features, quality of life improvements, and performance enhancements for the popular open source telemetry agent. This new release demonstrates the maintainers’ and the community’s commitment to creating the most performant and versatile open source agent for collecting, processing, transforming, and routing telemetry data.
Earlier this month, Fluent Bit surpassed 13 billion downloads from DockerHub—a remarkable figure since surpassing 1 billion downloads in March 2022. Although initially developed as a lightweight processor and forwarder for logs for resource-constrained environments such as edge devices. The recent growth in adoption of Fluent Bit has been driven by the rise of cloud and containerized environments. Contributors to this release include engineers from companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and others.
The new features in Fluent Bit v3 include integration with a variety of emerging open standards, making the already-ubiquitous project even more relevant to evolving, modern workloads in the cloud and at the edge.
- New in Fluent Bit v3 is the ability to filter Windows and MacOS metrics at scale, giving developers now greater control over their data and which metrics are prioritized for reporting.
- The latest version also adds support for HTTP/2, a faster and more efficient World Wide Web protocol compared to HTTP/1.1, which has seen steady adoption by a variety of projects and platforms since 2015.
- Finally, this release adds support for writing parser rules using SQL. This change adds another option for developers who would like to take advantage of the flexibility of Fluent Bit Parsers to modify parser behavior, but prefer SQL over writing RegEx rules or relying on default JSON bitwise conversion rules. In the last year, Fluent Bit has also added the ability to create custom processing plugins using Lua scripts or WebAssembly (Wasm). The addition of SQL is another step toward providing developers with the options and flexibility they desire.
“This latest release shows the energy of the Fluent Ecosystem community to ensure Fluent Bit continues to stay on the cutting edge of interoperability with open standards, not just for the ones in the logs space, but also for others such as Prometheus and OpenTelemetry” said Eduardo Silva Pereira, Project creator and Maintainer for Fluent Bit. “This release also shows that despite its popularity as a telemetry collector and processor for cloud native environments, it’s the best suitable solution for the edge, where performance and keeping resource utilization low is key. Thank you to all of the contributors for their pull requests, the users for their feedback, and the organizations that push the envelope of scale for observability and telemetry in general.”
To learn more about Fluent Bit, or meet with the Fluent Ecosystem community at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Paris, check out the following talks and resources:
- Fluent v3.0 announcement blog post: https://calyptia.com/blog/fluent-bit-v3
- Maintainer Patrick Stephens will be speaking at Cloud Native Rejekts on March 17: https://cfp.cloud-native.rejekts.io/cloud-native-rejekts-eu-paris-2024/talk/LXXPWR/
- Project creator and maintainer Eduardo Silva will be giving opening and closing remarks at Observability Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU on March 19: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/co-located-events/observability-day/
- Fluent Bit maintainers will be meeting at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU on March 22 from 16:55 – 17:30 CET in Pavilion 7 (Level 7.1, Room D)
- You can find the Fluent project kiosk at PP6-B in Pavilion 7 | Level 7.2 | Hall 7.2.
About the Fluent Bit project
Fluent Bit is a CNCF-graduated project under the umbrella of Fluentd, alongside other foundational technologies such as Kubernetes and Prometheus. It was originally created to be a lighter-weight version of Fluentd for collecting and forwarding logs from embedded Linux devices and containers where deploying Fluentd would be impractical or even impossible due to limited system resources. It has since evolved and is now capable of collecting logs, metrics, and traces, processing them in mid-stream, and routing them to any number of backends. Today, Fluent Bit is embedded in major Kubernetes distributions, including those from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
To learn more, visit https://fluentbit.io/ or join our community on Slack.
