About Cloudprober
Posted on Sep 05, 2023 by Manu Garg ‐ 3 min read
Origin
I started working on Cloudprober in 2016. I was leading the Cloud Networking SRE team at Google at that time. As Google Cloud started to grow big time, we started running into observability issues all over. Customers were finding problems before us, resulting in a lot of time being spent in troubleshooting and communicating back and forth1.
Problem was that Google’s existing observability tools didn’t work for the external Cloud. We needed to build things from ground up. As probers2 are pretty much the foundation of the reliable observability at Google, we decided to prioritize the development of a prober for Cloud. That’s how the journey of Cloudprober began.
Even though the primary goal of Cloudprober at that time was to discover and alert on Cloud Networking availability and performance problems, we decided to develop it as a generic prober that could be used to monitor a wide variety of systems and services. We also decided to make Cloudprober open source so that a wider community could trust it, contribute to it, and run it on their systems.
Keeping Cloudprober generic and ready for open-source paid off. More and more Cloud teams started using it internally, and our open-source readiness commitment made sure we kept our interfaces clean.
Built for Scale
Cloudprober was built to probe 100s of 1000s of endpoints (IPs and HTTP URLs), while keeping resources, and more importantly, management overhead very very low. That’s the reason Cloudprober tries to be frugal with the resources, maximizes resources utilization relying heavily on Go concurrency, supports probing large number of targets in parallel at a high frequency (in milliseconds), minimizes the need of frequent rollouts by supporting dynamic targets discovery, has native implementations for common probe types, and so on.
Beyond Google and Open-Source
During its early days, our priorities for Cloudprober were scalability, reliability, and ease of management. Things began to change as more and more Cloud products started using it, and users started asking for more features. However, the real shift to features happened after we open-sourced Cloudprober in 2017.
We added a wealth of features over time, such as first-class Kubernetes support, a built-in probe status UI, PostgreSQL and Cloudwatch surfacers, OAuth support, Validators, and most recently, built-in alerting capability. We used the same codebase for the internal and open-source versions, which created a huge advantage – we had an extensive deployment internally which provided a continuous testing platform for Cloudprober, particularly for its scalability and performance aspects, while it was going through all the big changes.
Move away from Google Github
I left Google in Nov 2021. To keep working on Cloudprober independently, I moved Cloudprober’s Github repository from github.com/google/cloudprober to github.com/cloudprober/cloudprober. This was a disruptive move (and we lost a lot of Github stars in the process 😃), but it had to be done one day anyway, in order for Cloudprober to become an independent entity and grow even faster. While I can’t say this authoritatively now, I believe Google still uses Cloudprober, possibly even more widely now, based on Googlers’ interactions with the project.
Growth and stability
Throughout its journey, Cloudprober has continuously adapted and expanded to meet the evolving needs of its users – an essential trait for any software. Without this attribute, software inevitably withers over time. To ensure Cloudprober thrives and evolves robustly, we’ve been very diligent that it grows in a structured way, a commitment we’ll uphold in future as well.