Introducing Fluentd

In this section, we will learn the basics of how to configure Fluentd. Before we do that, let’s learn a bit about the background of Fluentd and how it works at a high level.

Overview of Fluentd

Historically, one of the most popular open source stacks for handling log records has been the ELK stack from Elastic (https://www.elastic.co), based on Elasticsearch, Logstash (used for log collection and transformation), and Kibana. Since Logstash runs on a Java VM, it requires a relatively large amount of memory. Over the years, a number of open source alternatives have been developed that require significantly less memory than Logstash, one of them being Fluentd (https://www.fluentd.org).

Fluentd is managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) (https://www.cncf.io), the same organization that manages the Kubernetes project. Therefore, Fluentd has become a natural choice as an open-source-based log collector that runs in Kubernetes. Together...