Today we’re announcing the sunsetting of Cauldron.io. Launched in May 2015, Cauldron.io was a SaaS solution with a user-friendly metrics interface. We designed it to make analyzing open source projects easy and to expand access to meaningful open source insights. And in this we were able to help the many people who have used the platform.
We want to take this opportunity to thank the community of users who have relied on Cauldron.io over the years. Your support and feedback have been invaluable on this journey. Although we now see the need to end this project, we have learned a great deal from it and we carry those learnings and our open source-loving spirit forward through Bitergia Analytics.
Reflecting on Cauldron.io’s Journey
Back in 2014, we envisioned Cauldron.io as a solution to the challenges we saw with existing metrics platforms. We wanted to offer a more intuitive interface and a wider range of visualizations, creating a truly self-service metrics platform. In this respect, we were successful. The greatest hurdle we faced, however, was making such a platform commercially viable. While we had some paying customers, it wasn’t enough to sustain the project. This is a challenge many similar service offerings have faced, and unfortunately, we weren’t immune even without the need to hyperscale.
What allowed Bitergia to continue for longer despite these hurdles was our focus on expertise and consultancy. Our customers often don’t want to use the metrics tooling themselves. Instead, we are the users of our own tools to give tailored insights to our clients, answering their specific questions. This highlighted a key challenge: the steep learning curve for wider platform adoption.
As some of you may know, we discontinued Cauldron Cloud, our paid service, in 2023. Cauldron.io continued as a free service, and it continued to have a small but loyal group of users. But now the time has come to fully sunset it.
Several factors have contributed to this decision. The most important of these is our move out of the incubator, which provided us with inexpensive cloud services. This move requires us to streamline our offerings and remove all non-profitable services, including Cauldron.io. Now felt like the right time to “prune the vine” and focus our resources on more promising endeavors.
Although we are saying goodbye to Cauldron.io, we believe that it empowered users, and ultimately, it strengthened Bitergia Analytics and what we offer to the open source world.
The Legacy of Cauldron.io: Innovation in Open Source Metrics
While we’re sunsetting Cauldron.io as a standalone product, its legacy lives on within Bitergia Analytics. Our experience building and maintaining Cauldron.io has significantly shaped our approach to open source metrics and has directly influenced the development of Bitergia Analytics.
Before Cauldron.io, Bitergia relied solely on Elasticsearch and Kibana. Building Cauldron.io gave us the opportunity to experiment with Open Distro (which later became OpenSearch) as an alternative to Elasticsearch. This foresight proved invaluable when Elasticsearch changed its license away from open source. Because of our Cauldron.io experience, we were well-positioned to uphold our commitment to fully open source licensed products by transitioning all of our service offerings to OpenSearch.
Cauldron.io also served as a testing ground for scaling a metrics service beyond the limitations we faced with our initial architecture. We encountered performance bottlenecks around 3,000 repositories, but Cauldron.io allowed us to explore and implement solutions for handling hundreds of thousands of repositories. This experience is directly informing the development of our forthcoming GrimoireLab 2.0 release, which will incorporate these crucial scalability improvements.
Finally, Cauldron.io provided a valuable space to experiment with data visualizations. We learned a great deal about how to make complex data understandable and accessible, even to beginners. These insights have been incorporated into Bitergia Analytics, making it a more user-friendly and informative platform.
Looking forward
Although we’re sorry to be moving on from Cauldron.io, we’re also incredibly excited about the future and the opportunities we’re pursuing in other areas:
- Delivery Performance Analytics for automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers: We’re helping automotive companies optimize their software delivery processes. Learn more here: https://bitergia.com/delivery-performance-analytics/.
- Radar services to help companies strategically manage open source libraries and dependencies: We’re providing companies with the intelligence they need to navigate the open source ecosystem. More information is available here: https://bitergia.com/radar-service/.
In everything we do, we continue to embrace open source solutions and the importance of data and analytics to empower open source users.
A Personal Note to Cauldron.io Users
We know that approximately 40-60 monthly active users rely on Cauldron.io, and we’re sorry that this service will no longer be available. We want to personally reach out to you, our loyal users, and to offer Bitergia Analytics as an alternative. We know that this shift would be to a paid service, so we’d like to offer you 3 months for free. Please reach out to Georg Link (georglink@bitergia.com) to get started or just to learn more. Interested in seeing how Bitergia Analytics compares to what you’re used to from Cauldron? You can also find a comparison of Cauldron (at the time, Cauldron Cloud) and Bitergia Analytics here: https://bitergia.com/bitergia-analytics-vs-cauldron-cloud/.
Signing Off, With Gratitude
We want to express our sincere gratitude to the Cauldron.io user community. Thank you for your support and for being a part of this journey. We’re excited about the future and our new ventures, and we look forward to continuing to serve the open source community in new and innovative ways.
This post was written by Georg Link and Julia Lawson.
