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Thomas Gerber

Announcing Faros Community Edition — The open-source EngOps platform

Engineering teams typically struggle with getting visibility into their operations. Questions about engineering velocity, security, compliance, or cost, require non-trivial effort cobbling together data from different sources, writing ad hoc scripts, sifting through logs and more. By the time the analysis is ready, the data is often stale. Simple things shouldn’t be this hard. This is why we built Faros.

What is Faros?

Faros is an engineering operations platform that brings all operational data in one place to give engineering teams the visibility they need.
Today, we are excited to announce that we have open-sourced a community edition of Faros — Faros CE — that is now available for free on GitHub.

What can you do with Faros CE?

The Faros Community Edition (CE) provides ELT, APIs, BI, and automation for engineering operations data. With Faros CE, you can answer questions about bottlenecks in your CI/CD pipelines, issues in your onboarding processes, progress towards your goals, with data that is fresh, connected, queryable, and most importantly — ALL IN ONE PLACE!
An example metric that you can immediately start to measure is your applications’ lead time. Lead time is a software delivery metric popularized by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization, that measures the time it takes for changes to go from idea to production. With the Faros CE DORA dashboard, you can see
  1. How your lead time compares to known industry benchmarks
  2. The evolution of lead time for each of your applications over time, and
  3. The breakdown of lead time by stage, so you can start to see where the bottlenecks are in your software delivery process – whether its code reviews, QA or build times.
Being able to measure and break down lead time requires metadata from across your deployments, builds, artifacts, commits, pull requests, and tasks to be connected, queryable, and all in one place — hence Faros.

Lead times by application, by stage and over time

In addition to the out-of-the-box dashboards, you can build your own metrics in order to measure what matters most to you.

How is Faros CE built?

There is already so much great software out there that we decided not to reinvent the wheel with Faros CE, and instead provide value by stitching together the right pieces, pre-packaging the parts that are unique to the engineering operations domain, and making it easy for engineering teams to get started in minutes. Let’s take a peek at the internals. We’re using:
  • Airbyte for a rich and ever-expanding trove of data connectors
  • Hasura for flexible and scalable data APIs
  • dbt for data transformations that massage and enrich the data
  • Metabase for a full-fledged BI layer on top of the transformed data, and
  • n8n for automation so teams can create the workflows they need from their operational data

Faros CE architecture

On top of the basic services, we filled in the gaps in the open-source offerings. For instance, we
  • Contributed or enhanced Airbyte data connectors for the most common engineering data sources (think source control, task management, incident management etc.)
  • Pre-packaged a generalized engineering operations schema with an airbyte destination for mapping source data to the schema
  • Created data transformations, and built basic dashboards in metabase to provide a good starting point for visibility.

Ready to get started?

Containerized deployments make it easy to spool up the whole stack in minutes:
git clone https://github.com/faros-ai/faros-community-edition.git
cd faros-community-edition
./start.sh
Head on over to GitHub to get started today, and join us on our Slack channel for questions, discussions, and to meet the community.

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