Clarification on the status of the project

[rafaelgaspar]

Hi,

First of all thanks for releasing this piece of infrastructure software back to the community, we have been using it for while now and it saved us a lot on Datadog usage.

Since we are using this in our production environment we are bit worried that the project is not being maintained as it states it is.

Starting with v1.6, Veneur operates on a six-week release cycle, and all releases are tagged in git.

But the latest release was 9 months ago, so our main question is whether or not this 6-week release cycle is still something you are aiming at?

[ChimeraCoder]

Thanks for the heads-up - I should update that line in the documentation.

To answer your question: Veneur is still very much being maintained and developed! We began a 6-week release cycle in order to provide consistency around the timing of releases, which helped coordinate and broadcast updates among a then-small number of external users. Since then, the number of people and organizations using Veneur has grown dramatically, which means that major updates require more communication and planning, in order to ensure a smooth path for all users. Unfortunately, Github doesn't provide a great mechanism for two-way communication between project maintainers and users, which has made that tricky. We have plans to make some fairly significant upgrades to Veneur's operations in the coming months, so in advance of that, I've been setting up an out-of-band process (centered around an old-fashioned mailing list, to start) so we can scale Veneur's development and use effectively. Tagged releases solved this problem at one scale, but we'll need a more sophisticated approach moving forwards. (We do expect to keep tagging releases regularly, but tagging alone will not be sufficient for helping our users stay current with changes, especially on a six-week cycle).

In short: yes, Veneur is definitely being maintained. It's used at the core of the observability systems at Stripe, which transact massive sums of money every day, and as it's a critical piece of our infrastructure, we're continuing to invest in its development.

If you have any questions beyond that regarding your particular use case, you can also feel free to reach out to me via email as well (my first name, at stripe.com).