Thanos 0.17: Highly Available Prometheus
K8s Guru
2 min read
Table of Contents
Introduction
Prometheus is the de facto standard for Kubernetes metrics, but teams hit two predictable pain points as they scale: high availability (a single Prometheus isn’t enough) and long-term retention (local disks don’t age well).
Thanos 0.17, released on November 10, 2020, keeps addressing those day-2 realities: faster queries across large time ranges, tighter object storage integration, and better multi-cluster patterns for organizations running fleets.
Why this matters in practice
- Fewer blind spots: HA Prometheus setups reduce the chance that an outage also takes your monitoring down.
- Better historical context: long-term storage makes “what changed last month?” answerable.
- Fleet-wide visibility: multi-cluster querying helps when incidents span regions or environments.
Query Performance Improvements
- Query engine optimizations reduce latency for queries across large time ranges.
- Caching enhancements improve response times for frequently accessed metrics.
- Parallel querying enables faster aggregation across multiple Prometheus instances.
- Memory management improvements reduce resource usage during query execution.
Storage Integration
- Object storage improvements provide better integration with S3, GCS, and Azure Blob Storage.
- Compaction enhancements reduce storage requirements and improve query performance.
- Retention policies enable more flexible data lifecycle management.
- Backup and restore improvements simplify disaster recovery procedures.
Multi-Cluster Support
- Global querying enables querying metrics across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
- Federation improvements simplify aggregating metrics from distributed Prometheus instances.
- Service discovery enhancements automatically discover Prometheus instances across clusters.
- Load balancing provides better distribution of query load across instances.
Getting Started
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thanos-io/kube-thanos/main/examples/all/manifests/thanos-querier-deployment.yaml
Summary
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Release Date | November 10, 2020 |
| Headline Features | Query performance improvements, enhanced storage integration, better multi-cluster support |
| Why it Matters | Enables highly available, long-term Prometheus deployments at enterprise scale |
Thanos 0.17 continues to evolve as the standard for highly available Prometheus, providing teams with reliable, scalable observability for Kubernetes clusters.