In the latest years, I have been working on Fluent Bit project making it a reliable system-level tool to solve most of the logging challenges that we face nowadays, and with a strong focus on cloud environments. This process has been a joint effort with the community of individuals and companies who are deploying it in production.

The whole point of Logging is to perform Data Analysis, so whatever makes it reliable, easier and flexible is a good addition to have; as a project maintainer I am always looking for innovation and the Stream Processing topic have got a lot of attention in my circle of colleagues and community in general.

Stream Processing (aka SP) can be described as the ability to perform data processing while it\'s still in motion. Most of the people who are familiar with the SP term knows about Apache Spark, Apache Flink and Kafka Streams within others. Most of this tooling provides a full set of data processing capabilities and helps to perform a flexible Data Analysis once the data is fully aggregated.

I mentioned above that Stream Processing happens once the data is aggregated, this means that different services are sending data from multiple local/remote sources and aggregating them in a central place so data processing and analysis can be performed. But what about if we could do distributed stream processing on the edge side? this would be very beneficial since we could catch exceptions or trigger alerts based on specific data processing results as soon as they happen.

To implement Stream Processing on the Edge we need the proper tooling that at least must have the following features:

• Ability to collect, parse, filter and deliver data to remote hosts.
• Lightweight: low memory and CPU footprint.
• Provide a Query language to perform computation on top of streams of data.
• Be Open Source (of course right ? )

Fluent Bit is a good fit since it\'s nature is data collection, processing, and data delivery, it\'s a good option to extend it with Stream Processing capabilities, and that\'s something that at Arm and Treasure Data we have been working in the last weeks (despite the idea was born on 2018).

Our current implementation will be showcased in the upcoming Fluent Bit v1.1.0 release on April 2019. It brings a Stream Processor Engine with SQL support to query records, run aggregation functions doing windowing and optional grouping. In addition, it also allows the creation of new streams of data using query results that can be tagged and routed as normal records of the Fluent Bit pipeline, e.g:

In the next part, I will be sharing details on how to get started with this new Stream Processing feature. As usual we are looking for your feedback...

I've just noticed the last post on my blog was almost a year ago!, I will try to fix that and post more often.

Fluent Bit on 2017 got a lot of traction, since people from the CloudNative-space started asking for more specific features and these were implemented, now we can see that Fluent Bit is deployed a few thousands of times each single day and having a real impact where it's solving logging pains at scale.

As a maintainer and core developer, I am very happy to see this traction from users, but also there is a community growth which honestly, without them, the project will not be rocking as it's doing today. End users around the project are an important piece which helps with contributions, troubleshooting and feedback to align roadmap in the right direction, so thank you all for your help and patience!

On 2017 as of today, we have done 27 releases where 3 of them are major releases and the other just bug fixes focusing on stability. We started the year with 0.10 major version and finalizing with 0.12 as next stable, 0.13 is just showing up in a development stage.

From a technical perspective Fluent Bit acquired the following features on this year:

• Native support for nanoseconds timestamps
• Environment variables support in configuration
• UTF-8 Support
• Full Parsing interface (JSON and Regex backends)
• Built-in HTTP Client
• Tail input performance highly improved and Multiline logs support
• Systemd Journal Input: read logs from Systemd Journal
• Syslog input: extended support for old Syslog clients.
• Disk Input: new plugin to gather metrics from local disks.
• Kubernetes Filter: enrich logs with Kubernetes metadata
• Grep Filter: match and exclude records based on regex patterns
• Record Modifier Filter modify records content
• Elasticsearch output add support for Basic Auth
• Kafka REST Output Support Apache Kafka REST backend
• Flowcounter Output new counter/stats plugin
• File Output: write records to the file system (msgpack or JSON)
• Extended Unit testing: internal routines and runtime tests

the list could be more extensive as there are many other improvements on each subsystem, all of this have been done thanks to the contribution of more than 30 people considering areas such as bug reporting, troubleshooting, code fixes and documentation within others.

Fluent Bit 0.13

This is the current development version and in addition to 0.12 the following features are already available:

• New HTTP REST Interface:
  • Service information
  • JSON Metrics
  • Prometheus Metrics

More details about new stuff will be published at CloudNativeCon US!

Fluent Bit is a multi-platform Log Forwarder written in C

This year Fluent Bit got several new features, such as events routing, buffering, improved shared library mode and many new plugins to collect data and deliver to new destinations: in_tcp, in_forward, in_health, in_proc, out_http, out_influxdb, out_flowcounter, etc.

One of the recent features it got a lot of attention in the last CloudNativeCon, was the ability to extend it output destinations through Golang plugins, so Fluent Bit can load dynamically shared libraries created with Go, it's really neat.

Something I did not write too much about it, is the that the new version is fully running in Windows environment, the same code base works on Windows, it's portable (no Cygwin/MinGW), it can be compiled with Visual Studio without effort. This is still experimental but functional, I expect that for 0.11 release we have Windows binaries available and docs about it.

It have been exciting to see how the project have evolved and now is walking towards to be a Cloud Native Log Forwarder, there are some few missing features that are a priority for the beginning of this 2017 such as Filtering and Monitoring capabilities; they will come very soon.

At Treasure Data, we are fully committed to continue working hard to improve all aspects of logging in Cloud Environments, the recent news about Fluentd joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is just the beginning. You will expect many good news from both projects (Fluentd and Fluent Bit) in the incoming 2017.

Thanks to everyone involved in Fluent Bit!

It have been a while since the last post, so many good things happened. I will not dig into a full_detailed_post but some hints:

• Fluent Bit project v0.9 have been released. Now working towards 0.10 which comes with Golang support for output plugins within other neat things. Shortly it will become the default Log Forwarder :).
• Fluentd project have joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation!
• I spoke at LinuxCon Europe (Berlin), LinuxCon NorthAmerica (Toronto) and CloudNativeCon (Seattle).

I have no updates for Monkey or Duda, but they will come shortly as from a features perspective I need to connect the dots in Fluent Bit.

Some weeks ago I attended the Embedded Linux Conference in San Diego, I've participate from the Showcase demonstrating Fluent Bit and a non-longer-secret-project that runs on top of it, more news in the incoming weeks.

The guys from NextThing Co were around giving for free C.H.I.Ps, for who's not aware about what it is, the C.H.I.P is a 9USD ARM Embedded Computer, it's pretty neat!

As soon you power up the device through the micro-USB, you can access the serial console and start playing with it; it comes with Debian 8, Wifi (AP mode supported), 512 MB Ram, 1GHz Processor, 4GB storage...within others (and for 9 dollars!). Definitely you should consider to get one!

I am putting my hands on to make packages now for Fluent Bit and Monkey HTTP Server...