It's been a few weeks since Raj Dutt, Grafana Labs CEO and Co-Founder, announced the k6 acquisition during the closing session of GrafanaCONline 2021. You can learn more by reading our joint press release, or by watching the recording of the k6 Office Hours I joined the day after the announcement. With this blog I would like to share my excitement and my perspective.
The acquisition marks a milestone for the k6 team, our customers, and the k6 community. I believe joining the Grafana Labs family will accelerate our ability to give modern engineering teams better ways to build reliable applications.
Quick summary
- k6 is now part of Grafana Labs.
- Nothing changes for our existing customers.
- k6 will continue to operate independently, as a subsidiary to Grafana Labs, for the foreseeable future.
- The acquisition will strengthen the k6 OSS project, and over time, as we integrate our offerings, provide unique value to customers for better observability and reliability of their systems.
Almost five years ago, we started building k6 as the open-source load testing tool that would democratize load testing for modern developers — bringing together QA, developers, and operations teams to test the performance and reliability of their systems.
We brought k6 to the market with a few core principles and key differentiators in mind:
- Open Source: we believe developer tools should be open-source to invite a community to drive the project forward with us.
- Developer Oriented: testing is a cross-functional activity, k6 aims to provide a leading developer experience to enable dev teams to participate in testing their applications.
- Cloud Native: focusing on testing of cloud native systems and integrating k6 with CNCF technologies allows k6 to expand its capabilities, providing additional value to the community.
These are principles at the core of both companies. Grafana Labs is an active contributor to successful open-source projects such as Graphite, Prometheus, and Cortex. They have also launched other open-source projects, such as Loki, Metrictank, Tanka, Tempo, and of course Grafana, providing an open and composable observability stack.
The collaboration between k6 and Grafana started in 2017 - at the start of the k6 project. We launched a Grafana integration to visualize and analyze performance testing results that could serve as an open-source load testing stack for our community. In the years that followed we have continued our collaboration with the Grafana Labs team to support additional integrations with the Grafana ecosystem for both our offerings, k6 Open Source and k6 Cloud.
After talking with the Grafana Labs team about our products, the needs of our customers, and the future ahead, it became clear to us that we are aligned in the strategy and the vision for our two organizations. We’re convinced that both open-source users and our customers will benefit tremendously from joining efforts.
Our paths have been adjacent until now, and our capabilities complementary. Looking ahead, k6 users will unlock the full potential of the Grafana monitoring and observability stack to diagnose system issues in more flexible and effective ways. Grafana Labs customers will find a perfect match in k6 to proactively test their systems and remediate problems before impacting end users.
Thank you
For me this is 14 years of work coming to fruition, and a new beginning at the same time. I'm tremendously proud of our team for this milestone.
A sincere thanks to all of our customers and users in the community. We highly value your contributions and comments and hope to continue earning your trust and business as we move forward.
I’d also like to thank our departing board of directors. You’ve been with us on the entire journey, and you afforded the management team the trust and time needed to build out the company to what it is today.
Lastly, but certainly not least, I’d like to thank Raj, Doug, Ash, Eyal and the rest of the Grafana Labs team for the great conversations and pleasant process over the past couple of months that led to this acquisition. Thank you!
What's next?
At k6 we’re very excited about joining the Grafana Labs family, and to continue building k6 to become the open and extensible testing solution we’ve always envisioned.
Raj and I will join k6 Developer Advocates Nicole van der Hoeven and Simme Aronsson for Office Hours, this Friday, at 5pm CET. Bring your questions about what's next for k6 and our joined product offering!