NEW YORK—Getting visibility into applications and infrastructure that is running in the cloud is not always an easy task. At the Tectonic Summit here, Intel announced a new open-source project called Snap, designed to help improve visibility into cloud infrastructure.

In a video interview with eWEEK, Jonathan Donaldson, vice president and general manager, Software Defined Infrastructure Group at Intel, details what Snap is all about and how it can also help drive increased use of cloud technologies.

Snap is a plugable open-source platform telemetry framework that is able to collect and expose data about underlying infrastructure that is running a cloud environment. For now, Snap is its own open-source project on Github, but in the future, it could land under the auspices of a larger open-source group.

"We're one of the core members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), so I wouldn't be surprised if it shows up there in one form or another," Donaldson said.

The CNCF, announced in July, currently hosts the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration platform as its primary effort.

For Intel, Snap is an open-source effort, but it could help Intel's commercial aspirations as well by way of Jevon's Paradox, which is the notion that as efficiency improves, consumption also grows.

"The core concept behind Jevon's Paradox is that by making something more efficient, lowering the unit cost and having easy access, that drives new innovation," Donaldson said. "By exposing more silicon metrics and all of the things we can collect to make better decisions to understand what's going on, allows us to automate to a better extent and that drives unit cost down by improving efficiency."

Watch the full video interview with Jonathan Donaldson below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.