New Relic Joins Cloud Native Computing Foundation Governing Board and is in the Process of Contributing Pixie Open Source for Kubernetes-Native Observability

New Relic, Inc. announced it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Governing Board as a platinum member. New Relic supports CNCF’s mission of making cloud-native computing ubiquitous by providing governance, thought leadership, and engineering resources to shape and influence the direction of the cloud-native ecosystem. As part of this mission, as well as New Relic’s commitment to making observability open for everyone, New Relic is in the process of contributing Pixie, its Kubernetes-native in-cluster observability platform, as a new open source project to CNCF under Apache 2.0 license. Zain Asgar, GM of Pixie and New Relic Open Source, and CEO and co-founder of Pixie Labs (acquired by New Relic in December 2020), has joined the CNCF Governing Board and will participate in a keynote address at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021. New Relic will also expand its existing relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide its Pixie observability solution on AWS.

“Open source is a defining value for New Relic and Pixie, which is why we are standardizing our observability offerings with OpenTelemetry and are in the process of contributing Pixie as an open source project to CNCF,” said Zain Asgar, GM of Pixie and New Relic Open Source at New Relic, and CEO and co-founder of Pixie Labs. “We have seen the positive impact of open governance on open source projects first-hand, and we look forward to supporting this initiative on an industry-wide level through our Platinum membership in CNCF.”

Pixie Open Source

Pixie, the next-generation observability platform for cloud-native applications, enables developers to see all of their applications’ metrics, events, logs, and traces with a single CLI command. Pixie’s technology removes the need to add instrumentation code, set up ad hoc dashboards, or move data off of the cluster, saving developers valuable time so they can focus instead on building better software. The open sourcing of Pixie represents a significant investment in the community, and a majority of Pixie’s engineering resources have been dedicated to the effort.

“The cloud native community is the fastest growing open source community in the world. Our mission in CNCF is to go further and make cloud native computing ubiquitous,” said Priyanka Sharma, General Manager at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We are pleased to welcome New Relic as a Platinum member, and to add Zain Asgar to our board. Zain and New Relic’s commitment to furthering our mission and supporting our community will go a long way. We look forward to their nuanced expertise and perspective on observability in particular.”

Pixie on AWS

Pixie Open Source will now run on AWS as an expansion of the recent collaboration with New Relic on AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry as a secure, production-ready, AWS-Supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry project. Pixie Open Source on AWS aims to improve customer experience and make it easier for users to monitor the health and performance of their AWS container applications. In addition, Jaana Dogan, Principal Engineer at AWS, will join the Pixie open source governance board.

Mark Carter, General Manager, Observability Services, AWS said, “With eBPF, a new instrumentation capability in Linux that is supported by the Pixie Platform, developers and operators can take advantage of a new observability superpower. Pixie’s no-instrumentation data collection capability together with OpenTelemetry protocol support in New Relic is a great example of invent and simplify on behalf of our customers and positions New Relic as an innovation leader. We are excited to collaborate with New Relic to extend the power of Pixie to the wider CNCF community.”

New Relic’s Commitment to Open Source

As part of its commitment to the CNCF community, open source, and open standards, New Relic will standardize its observability offerings with CNCF’s OpenTelemetry standards. New Relic’s native OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) support and curated user experiences will allow customers to use this new standard of instrumentation to understand, troubleshoot, and optimize their systems. New Relic has also open sourced more than 10 years of R&D in agents, integrations, SDKs, CLIs and custom visualizations in its New Relic One catalog, making it easier for engineers to access and build custom instrumentation. New Relic is also a founding member of Eclipse Adoptium, a leading provider of fully compatible, high-quality distributions of Java runtimes based on OpenJDK source codes.

For developers who need instant visibility into their cloud-native applications without any instrumentation, New Relic is making Pixie Open Source generally available to all customers globally on May 4, 2021, to coincide with the first day of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021. For more information on Pixie Open Source, visit px.dev.