Graphite vs Thanos: What are the differences?

## Introduction
Graphite and Thanos are both popular tools used for monitoring and observability in modern IT infrastructure. While they may seem similar at first glance, there are key differences that make each unique in its own way.

1. **Data Storage**: Graphite stores its data in Whisper, a fixed-size database optimized for writes. On the other hand, Thanos uses object storage like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, allowing for virtually unlimited data retention and scalability.

2. **High Availability**: Graphite does not natively support high availability, requiring additional configurations and setups to achieve redundancy. Thanos, on the other hand, comes with built-in high availability features, making it easier to ensure data availability and reliability.

3. **Querying Flexibility**: Graphite has limitations in querying historical data due to Whisper's fixed-size database structure. Thanos provides seamless querying across all data stored in object storage, making it easier to access and analyze historical metrics.

4. **Data Deduplication**: Thanos includes a powerful feature known as data deduplication, which allows for efficient storage and retrieval of metrics. This results in reduced storage costs and improved query performance compared to Graphite's standard storage mechanisms.

5. **Horizontal Scalability**: Graphite traditionally struggles with horizontal scalability as it requires manual sharding and clustering for large deployments. Thanos, on the other hand, is designed with horizontal scalability in mind, offering native support for federation and distributed architectures.

6. **Long-Term Storage**: Thanos excels in long-term storage capabilities by leveraging object storage for storing historical data efficiently and cost-effectively, whereas Graphite may face challenges in handling long-term data retention due to Whisper's limitations.

In Summary, Graphite and Thanos differ in their data storage mechanisms, high availability support, querying flexibility, data deduplication capabilities, scalability options, and long-term storage solutions.