In Chapter 13, Scaling and Federating Prometheus, we were introduced to Thanos, an open source project that was created to improve upon some of the shortcomings of Prometheus at scale. Specifically, we went through how Thanos solves having a global view of several Prometheus instances using the Thanos sidecar and querier components. It's now time to meet other Thanos components and explore how they work together to enable cheap long-term retention using object storage. Keep in mind that complexity will increase when going down this path, so validate your requirements and whether the global view approach and local storage aren't enough for your particular use case.