OpenObservability Talks

Catch up on everything you missed at KubeCon North America 2024! Join us for a special recap that brings you closer to the action. This is a special episode in collaboration with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the foundation behind KubeCon+CloudNativeCon and the cloud-native projects.

In this episode of OpenObservability Talks, Dotan Horovits sits down with Yuri Shkuro, the creator of Jaeger, to unveil the highly anticipated Jaeger V2. This major release introduces a new architecture with deep OpenTelemetry integration, which promises more flexibility, performance, extensibility and ease of use. Join us as Yuri shares insider details on the challenges, innovations, and roadmap for Jaeger V2 towards a more efficient and scalable distributed tracing solution.

Yuri is a software engineer who works on distributed tracing, observability, reliability, and performance problems, currently working at Meta; author of the book "Mastering Distributed Tracing"; creator of Jaeger, an open source distributed tracing platform originally developed at Uber; co-founder of the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry CNCF projects; member of the W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group.

PromCon, the flagship yearly event of the Prometheus community, is back in Berlin, and we’re here to bring you the highlights from the Prometheus ecosystem. And this year we’ve got some major news: Prometheus’s long-awaited major release, v3.0! 

Join us to hear all about the revamped user interface, about Remote Write 2.0, and about Prometheus’ goal to become the default backend for storing OpenTelemetry metrics, featuring native OTel support, and much more. We’ll cover these and more highlights from the Prometheus ecosystem.

Our guest is no other than Julius Volz, creator of Prometheus, and founder of the PromCon conference. Julius created the Prometheus monitoring at SoundCloud and led the project through open source and beyond. He now focuses on growing the Prometheus community, and helps companies use and adapt Prometheus through his company PromLabs. Before that, Julius was a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, where he gained experience monitoring at hyperscale.

OpenShift is an open-source container application platform that brings Docker and Kubernetes together to help organizations build, deploy, and manage containerized applications. Open source OpenShift (OKD) powers some of the largest Kubernetes clusters, such as in CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Join us for a fireside chat with an OpenShift veteran Radek Vokál, on the current state of the OpenShift project, its vibrant community, and the pivotal role Red Hat plays in its development and growth.

In this episode we delved into how observability is integrated within OpenShift, discussing key strategies, tools and open source projects for effective monitoring, troubleshooting and cost management. Whether you're managing complex deployments or seeking to enhance system performance, this episode offers valuable insights and practical guidance on leveraging OpenShift for improved observability. Don't miss this in-depth discussion!

Our guest is Radek Vokál, Senior Manager, Red Hat Observability Product Management. With 20 years at Red Hat, Radek has been involved in OpenShift from engineering and product side. Radek currently leads product management for the OpenShift Observability. Radek has also been a co-organizer of the DevConf.cz open source community conference in the Czech Republic for the last 17 years.

Time to explore the next frontier in cloud-native evolution: WebAssembly (WASM). Moving beyond containers and Kubernetes, WASM bears the promise to revolutionize the cloud landscape with unparalleled performance, portability, and security. Can it actually deliver on this promise? We discussed this and more it in this episode.

We delved into how WASM is transforming the way we build and run cloud-native applications, enabling a more efficient, scalable, and flexible infrastructure. We also got latest insights from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s work in the domain, the wasmCloud open source project and the tool landscape, along with the work of the WASM working group and standardization efforts with the Bytecode Alliance.

This episode’s guest is Taylor Thomas, Engineering Director working on WebAssembly platforms at Cosmonic. He serves as a co-chair for the CNCF’s WASM working group, and as a CNCF Ambassador. He actively participates in the open source community and is one of the creators of Krustlet and Bindle. His work at Intel, Nike, and Microsoft spanned various containers and Kubernetes platforms as well as WebAssembly platforms.

Redis is no longer open source. Just a few months ago, in March 2024, the project was relicensed, leaving its vast community confused. But the community did not give up, and started work to fork Redis to keep it open. 

In this episode, we delve into the Valkey project, a prominent fork of Redis, established under the Linux Foundation, which brought together important figures from the Redis community, as well as leading industry giants including AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and others. Valkey has rapidly gained momentum and just reached General Availability (GA). 

Join us as we explore the motivations behind Valkey's creation, hear first-hand stories on its foundation and journey to GA, and learn of its Redis compatibility, roadmap and implications for the open-source community. 

Valkey's first Contributor Summit is taking place June 5-6 in Seattle and we will bring you announcements and updates hot off the summit. Our guest is Kyle Davis, the Senior Developer Advocate on the Valkey project, and a past contributor for Redis. 

Kyle currently works at AWS, a founding member of Valkey, and has a long history with open source and with forks. He was a founding contributor to the OpenSearch project, which started as a fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana after the latter's relicensing off OSS. Most recently Kyle worked to build a community around Bottlerocket OSS project.  

In the past few years we’ve been witnessing tectonic shifts in the open source realm, with established projects taken off open source or otherwise turning to the dark side. On the other hand, we’ve seen active forks aiming to keep these projects open gaining momentum.

What does it mean for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement? Is this a trend or just a passing wave? What can we learn from it as vendors and as a community?

In this special episode concluding the fourth season of OpenObservability talks we will look back at the past year, including the very recent relicensing of Redis, and will discuss the state of open source with the help of open source pundit David Nalley.

David has been involved in open source for nearly two decades. He is the director of open source strategy at AWS and currently serves as the President of the Apache Software Foundation and serves on the Board of Directors for the Internet Security Research Group.

KubeCon Europe 2024 in Paris was the biggest event of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to date, with over 12k participants. Have you missed it? We've got you covered! Join not one but two CNCF Ambassadors as they explore the latest and greatest highlights from the event that every tech enthusiast is talking about.  

But that's not all! We'll also zoom in on K8sgpt, a new entrant to the CNCF’s sandbox that uses generative AI to give Kubernetes superpowers to everyone. Does this open source project go beyond the GenAI hype and get us closer to diagnosing and triaging issues in plain English? Let’s ask the maintainers behind the project.

Our guest is Thomas Schuetz, a Principal Cloud Architect with a keen interest in cloud-native application delivery. Thomas teaches at an Austrian University of Applied Sciences, focusing on cloud-native technologies. Thomas is enthusiastic about open source projects, contributing as a Keptn GC Member and K8sGPT Maintainer, alongside his role as Co-Chair of the CNCF TAG App Delivery. He also brings a deep industry background from his past roles at Dynatrace and more.

OpenTelemetry is expanding beyond the traditional “three pillars of observability” and introduces a groundbreaking addition to its signals - Continuous Profiling. The new Profiling Special Interest Group (SIG) that was formed to lead the topic has already made significant advancements, to be featured at KubeCon Europe. Join us in this special panel episode of OpenObservability Talks as we explore the significance of this new dimension in understanding application behavior, optimizing performance, and gaining deeper insights into your systems. Our expert guests, Felix Geisendörfer and Ryan Perry, members of the OpenTelemetry Profiling SIG, share their insights into how Profiling enhances the OpenTelemetry framework, and update on the work for open specification and implementation. 

This special episode hosts a panel of two distinguished members of OpenTelemetry’s Profile SIG, and prominent members of the observability vendor ecosystem. Felix Geisendörfer is a Senior Staff Engineer at Datadog where he works on Continuous Profiling and contributes to the Go runtime. Before that he was working at Apple, co-founded Transloadit, contributed to node.js and inspired a generation of mad scientists to program flying robots with it. Ryan Perry is Principal Product Manager at Grafana Labs. He has built a career at various startups while actively contributing to open source projects and advancing open telemetry initiatives. Most recently he built Pyroscope, an open source continuous profiling project/company, which has been acquired by Grafana Labs.

The .NET programming language is taking cloud native deployment and observability seriously, and most notably with the recent announcement of .NET Aspire stack unveiled at the recent .NET Conf 2023. 

In this episode, we reviewed the open source maintainers’ journey to making .NET a "by default, out of the box observable platform", as ASP.NET Core creator David Fowler put it. David was this episode’s guest, and with him we dived into .NET Aspire and how it simplifies the complexities of cloud app development with capabilities around service discovery, observability, and resilience. We discussed the local developer experience, the path to developer observability, and what we can expect from the upcoming GA release of .NET8.

David Fowler has been at Microsoft for 15 years working on developer frameworks and tools in the .NET space. He's one of the creators of several popular OSS frameworks and tools such as NuGet, SignalR and ASP.NET Core, and also architected the Azure SignalR Service. Originally from Barbados, he's an avid open-source advocate and developer currently focused on simplifying developer experiences in the microservice space. 

In this episode, join us as we delve into the intricate world of Platform Engineering with Aparna Subramanian, Director of Production Engineering at Shopify. Discover how Shopify, a powerhouse in e-commerce, masters the art of scaling platform engineering. Gain invaluable insights into their strategies, innovations, and lessons learned while navigating the complexities of sustaining and evolving a robust infrastructure to support millions, even through special peak events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you're keen on understanding the backbone of a thriving online platform, don’t miss out on this episode.

Aparna started her career as a Software Engineer and has spent most part of her almost two decades of technology experience specializing in Infrastructure and Data Platforms. In her current role she leads Shopify’s Cloud Native Production Platform.

Previously, she was Director of Engineering at VMware where she was a founding member of Tanzu on vSphere, a Kubernetes Platform for the hybrid cloud. She also serves as co-chair of the “CNCF End User Developer Experience” SIG and as member of the CNCF End user technical advisory board.

In this special episode we wrapped up the year 2023 with none other than the cloud-native maestro, Kelsey Hightower! We looked into the highs and lows of the tech landscape, exploring Kelsey's insights on containerization and beyond. Tune in as we unravel the year that was and reflect on what lies ahead for Kubernetes and cloud computing.

Kelsey has been there since the birth of Kubernetes, with his contributions to the project as well as his advocacy for containers and cloud native tech and concepts. Join us to conclude 2023 with a look above the clouds.

Have you missed KubeCon North America in Chicago? This one’s for you! In this episode, we explored the latest and greatest highlights from the event that every tech enthusiast is talking about. From cutting-edge innovations to industry insights, we've got the broad spectrum covered. 

But that's not all! We'll also zoomed in on Istio, the popular service mesh open source project that has just recently reached CNCF graduation. Join us as we map out the service mesh universe, and then dive into Istio's galaxy, unraveling its architecture, features, and the roadmap direction with Ambient. And you’ll get to hear it from the Istio authority, Lin Sun.

Lin is the Director of Open Source at Solo.io and a CNCF ambassador. She has worked on the Istio service mesh since the beginning of the project in 2017 and serves on the Istio Steering Committee and Technical Oversight Committee. Previously, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM for 15+ years. She is the author of the book "Istio Ambient Explained" and co-author of “Istio Explained”, and has more than 200 patents to her name.

PromCon, the flagship yearly event of the Prometheus community, took place in Berlin 28-29 September 2023, and we’re here to bring you the highlights from the Prometheus ecosystem, including the pivotal decision on Prometheus 3.0! Brace yourselves for some exciting announcements! We also delved into the latest addition to the ecosystem, Perses project, which promises to revolutionize the world of dashboard visualization and monitoring. This new open source project, now part of the Linux Foundation, aims to become the GitOps-friendly standard dashboard visualization tool for Prometheus and other data sources. On this episode I hosted Augustin Husson, Prometheus maintainer and the creator of the Perses project, at the heels of his PromCon announcement of the Perses release. Augustin is also principal engineer at Amadeus, a technology vendor for travel agencies. Augustin joined Amadeus to create a new internal monitoring system based on Prometheus, and he will also share his end-user journey and insights.

DevOps is not just about operating the software in production, but also about releasing that software to production. Well-functioning CI/CD pipelines are critical for the business, and this calls for quality observability, to handle broken and flaky pipeline runs effectively. On this episode I hosted Oleg Nenashev, a core maintainer and board member in the Jenkins project, as well as a TOC member in the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Oleg is a community builder, open source advocate and consultant, now at WireMock Inc. He is also a CDF and CNCF ambassador. We discussed CI/CD, observability, the prominent open source projects and foundations, as well as a new proposal for extending OpenTelemetry to natively support CI/CD observability use cases.

Terraform is no longer open source. This is the news we got last month (August 2023), when HashiCorp announced its decision to relicense its open source tools, including Terraform, Vault, Packer, Consul, Vagrant and others, into Business Source License 1.1. The community, led by active Terraform-based vendors, gathered up to create a fork of Terraform to keep it open. The result is OpenTofu (originally called OpenTF), whose manifesto already has tens of thousands of stars on GitHub, less than a month out. Only a month old, engineers are hard at work to establish the first release of OpenTofu, as well as its foundational backbone. In this month’s episode I covered these significant events that shake our industry and the DevOps world. I was joined by Omry Hay, co-founder and CTO of env0. env0 provides an automation solution based on Terraform, and is one of the creators of OpenTofu and a member of the project’s steering committee. Omry also shared OpenTofu’s mission and current status, as well as exciting updates, hot off Open Source Summit Europe conference taking place these days, in which OpenTofu has officially joined The Linux Foundation. Omry has been a software engineer and engineering manager for the last 16 years, working at companies like eToro, Fiverr and Proofpoint. As CTO of env0, he leads the R&D and Product departments.

The episode was live-streamed on 18 September 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QdUs9VKq5g

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.

Fluentd and Fluent Bit are two highly popular open source projects for data collection and log forwarding in the realm of observability. Fluentd's flexibility and scalability have led to seamless integration with diverse applications and data sources, while Fluent Bit's lightweight and efficient log forwarding have made it a preferred choice for modern observability pipelines. But Fluent Bit can process more than just logs. The recent release of Fluent Bit v2 added major new integrations with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and more, as well as extensibility with WebAssembly plugins.

On this episode I hosted Eduardo Silva Pereira, one of Fluentd project maintainers and creator of Fluent Bit. He also is the founder of Calyptia, the Fluent company. Eduardo shared with us the latest updates of Fluentd and Fluent Bit, as well as valuable insights into the future roadmap of these projects. The episode was live-streamed on 9 August 2023 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/V02Ctv0Rtg8

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.

eBay is a high scale end user of open source observability. Collecting telemetry from millions of endpoints, and running thousands of queries per second, presents serious scaling challenges. eBay has chosen to use an open source stack to meet those challenges. On this episode I hosted Vijay Samuel, Observability Architect at eBay, to hear about the challenges eBay faced in monitoring large Kubernetes installations. We discussed why eBay chose the open source stack, and the strategic decision behind eBay's migration from Elastic Beats to OpenTelemetry, and the remarkable experiences they had while deploying massively large scale telemetry installations using OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. We also discussed a fascinating new proposal for a query language standard for observability, which eBay spearheads together with Netflix under the auspices of the CNCF’s TAG Observability (the CNCF’s technical advisory group for observability).

The episode was live-streamed on 8 June 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UsU3nRglhA

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.

With over 1,000 companies using it and 21.5K+ stars on GitHub, the Backstage open source project is quickly becoming a go-to tool for managing developer infrastructure. In this episode, I’ll sit down with Lee Mills, a Senior Engineering Manager from Spotify's Backstage project, to learn more about how the open source platform is revolutionizing the developer experience and how it aligns with the growing Internal Developer Platform (IDP) space. We’ll discuss the need that drove Spotify to build this internal tool, about the decision and journey to open source it and donate it to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). We’ll also discuss the new commercial plugins, what’s coming up on the roadmap, and much more. 

Lee has worked as an engineering manager for the past 12 years, from Amazon to Spotify and everything in between. Prior to that Lee had a mixed background working in academia as a lecturer, worked as a Boom Op for television in the UK and lived in more places than he can count.

The episode was live-streamed on 17 May 2023 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/W3c4YJ71BOQ

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

This is a special episode, live from the KubeCon show floor in Amsterdam. Join us to hear the hot updates from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 as well as insider insights from the CNCF’s head of ecosystem, Taylor Dolezal. Taylor works on infrastructure tools that enable innovation. He specializes in Kubernetes, Terraform, public clouds, and distributed systems. Taylor will also deliver the opening keynote on the upcoming KubeCon EU in Amsterdam. The episode was live-streamed on 20 April 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/a9D5p0SaKL8?feature=share

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is the home of the most prominent open source projects used today, such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, ArgoCD, Linkerd and more. These projects fuel today’s cloud native architectures and software release pipelines. With its immense growth, it has become difficult to keep tabs on the hundreds of new and evolving projects and specifications, the different working groups and technical advisory groups, the different community forums and events, and to see where it’s all heading.

I invited Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF, to join me on this episode, to help us understand the CNCF landscape and evolution. We will also discuss the trends in observability and in the open source realm in general. Chris also has some interesting predictions to share. 

Chris Aniszczyk is an open source executive and engineer with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He's currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation focused on developer relations and running the Open Container Initiative (OCI) / Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Furthermore, he's a partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups.

At Twitter, he created their open source program and led their open source efforts. For many years he served on the Eclipse Foundation's Board of Directors representing the committer community and the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee. In a previous life, he bootstrapped a consulting company, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many eclipse.org and Linux related projects.

The episode was live-streamed on 15 March 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/lMUFGmNploc

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.

Many organizations struggle in understanding and monitoring the costs of their Kubernetes workloads, cloud infrastructure and cloud native applications. Moreover, different cloud providers use different conventions, which makes it difficult to compare across vendors and to monitor cost in multi-cloud environments. The lack of cost observability and vendor-agnostic FinOps standardization can become a critical business challenge.  

OpenCost is a vendor-neutral open source project for measuring and allocating infrastructure and container costs. It’s built for Kubernetes cost monitoring to power real-time cost monitoring, showback, and chargeback, across on-premises Kubernetes as well as cloud managed offering.  

I discussed this topic with Matt Ray, Senior Community Manager for the OpenCost project. Matt  has been active in Open Source and DevOps communities for over two decades and has spoken at and helped organize many conferences and meetups. He is currently the Senior Community Manager at Kubecost for the CNCF Sandbox Project OpenCost. Matt also co-hosts the Software Defined Talk podcast.

The episode was live-streamed on 14 February 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqXQV2jsxo

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

A 3-node Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus will ship around 40k active series by default! Do we really need all that data? The current state of Kubernetes open source monitoring is in need of improvement. High churn rate of pod metrics, proliferation of metrics with low usage, and configuration complexity are some of the issues that need to be addressed.

I discussed this topic with Aliaksandr Valialkin, CTO at VictoriaMetrics and creator of the open source project. We discussed the common problems, as well as directions and best practices to overcome some of these complexities as individuals and as a community. We also discussed VictoriaMetrics open source project and how it addresses some of these challenges.

Aliaksandr a Golang engineer, who likes writing simple and performant code and creating easy-to-use programs. Sometimes these hard-to-match requirements work together, like in the VictoriaMetrics case.

The episode was live-streamed on 24 January 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/Z-58C8HFGb8

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

So much has been going on with the Prometheus project and its ecosystem, that it’s time to have a proper catch up. And there’s no better person to walk us through it than Julien Pivotto, who debriefed the community last month at PromCon.

Julien Pivotto is a maintainer of Prometheus, the open source monitoring and alerting solution. He is the co-founder of the company O11y, that provides premium support for open source observability tools such as Prometheus, Thanos and Grafana.

The episode was live-streamed on 19 December 2022 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vui4EgveUxg

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

At Meta (Facebook, Instragram et al) everything is data, and data driven approach is the rule, from product to engineering, from HR to finance. This is also how the team at Meta treats observability. Let’s see how we treat observability as a data analytics problem, and what you can implement, even if you’re not a hyperscaler.

On this episode I’ll host David Ostrovsky from Meta. David is a software developer with over 20 years of industry experience, speaker, trainer, blogger and co-author of “Pro Couchbase Server”. He specializes in large-scale distributed system architecture.

The episode was live-streamed on 7 November 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/1l0HKUDoX4Q

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

Everyone’s talking about Platform Engineering these days. Even Gartner featured it in its Hype Cycle for Software Engineering 2022. But what is Platform Engineering really about? Is it the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Is it just a fancy rebrand for DevOps or SRE? And how does observability pertain to platform engineering?

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks Horovits hosted George Hantzaras, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Citrix. George is a distributed systems expert and a hands-on engineering leader with focus on delivering B2B cloud services at scale. Coming from a DevOps background, he focuses on implementing SRE at enterprise scale working with cloud native technologies. He has been organizing the Athens Cloud Computing Meetup since 2016 and the Athens Hashicorp User Group. Most recently, he has been a speaker at global events like Hashiconf, DeveloperWeek, Voxxed Days, DevNexus and more, focusing on reliability engineering, agile leadership, scaling engineering teams, and entrepreneurship.

The episode was live-streamed on 6 October 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/zJGMUVY6fDM

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

Instrumentation is that black magic that makes our application emit traces, logs, metrics or other telemetry. How does it work? What options are available in different programming languages, such as Java, Python and Go? What does OpenTelemetry offer in this domain?  

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Eden Federman, Co-Founder & CTO at keyval, a company focused on making observability simpler. Eden is the creator of two open source projects: Odigos and Go automatic instrumentation (now part of OpenTelemetry). Eden is passionate about everything related to observability and performance monitoring. He also created kubectl-flame, a profiler for Kubernetes.

The episode was live-streamed on 22 September 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/VFykWV1mLAI

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

In this episode, hosted by Jonah Kowall we are excited to introduce Pranay Prateek the co-founder and creator of SigNoz to the audience. He is an entrepreneur who has been building an interesting and exciting open-source observability platform. The goal is a unified interface and data storage system which is scalable and manageable much more easily than today’s disjointed open-source tools. SigNoz has a goal of unifying tracing, metrics, and logging in a single platform and interface. We’ll dig into the evolution of this unique project from its creation until today, along with the adoption of the technology and contribution from the community. We will discuss the data architecture and their move from Druid towards ClickHouse, which is always a fascinating topic. Finally, we’ll elaborate on the future of SigNoz and where things are going with the project. Join me, Jonah Kowall, as I speak with Pranay Prateek on this episode of OpenObservability Talks.

The podcast episodes are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on this YouTube channel.

Socials:

We all collect logs, metrics and perhaps traces and other data types, in support of our observability. But this can get expensive pretty quickly, especially in microservices based systems, in what is commonly known as “the cardinality problem”.  

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I’ll host Ben Sigelman, co-founder and the GM of Lightstep, to discuss this data problem and how to overcome it. Ben architected Google’s own planet-scale metrics and distributed tracing systems (still in production today), and went on to co-create the open-source OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects, both part of the CNCF.

The episode was live-streamed on 12 July 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/gJhzwP-mZ2k

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

OpenTelemetry is one of the most fascinating and ambitious open source projects of this era. It’s currently the second most active project in the CNCF (the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), with only Kubernetes being more active. The entire industry is aligning behind this project, including incumbent monitoring vendors that were deeply vested in proprietary and closed-source agents to that end.

In this episode of OpenObservability Talks I’ll host Alolita Sharma to discuss OpenTelemetry, its origins and mission statement, as well as updates hot off the press from the recent KubeCon conference in Valencia about releases and future plans.

Alolita is co-chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Group for Observability, member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee and a board director of the Unicode Consortium. She has served on the boards of the OSI and SFLC.in. Alolita has led engineering teams at Wikipedia, Twitter, PayPal, IBM and AWS. Two decades of doing open source continue to inspire her.

Developers hate monitoring, but we need it. We need it in many points of the software development lifecycle: before deprecating an API, before launching a new feature, after launching the feature, and more. In fact, monitoring needs can vary much more than the classic Ops monitoring.

In this episode I’ll host Liran Haimovitch to discuss how to determine what developers should be monitoring, the difference between observability for Dev and for Ops, and how observability fits into our current dev tools, dev stack and dev processes.

Liran is the Co-Founder and CTO of Rookout. He’s an Observability and Instrumentation expert with a deep understanding of Java, Python, Node, and C++. Liran has broad experience in cybersecurity and compliance from his past roles. When not coding, you can find Liran hosting his podcast, speaking at conferences, writing about his tech adventures, and trying out the local cuisine when traveling.

OpenSearch is a community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2. The OpenSearch project started just over a year ago and is now the open-source alternative to ELK, which is no longer open source. The team has spent much of the last year getting the project going, but there was innovation as well. We will cover and discuss what OpenSearch has accomplished, but more importantly what’s coming next, including a big 2.0 release. We are joined in this episode by Eli Fisher, who is the product lead at AWS, working on the OpenSearch project. He’ll dive into recent launches, including several observability features, and innovations planned for 2.0 and beyond.   

The podcast episodes are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on this YouTube channel.  

Google’s SRE Book popularized the concept of Service Level Objective (SLO) and the SLO-driven approach. But what does it really mean to make SLO driven decisions? How can we generate observability and synchronize teams around joint SLOs? And how can we automate SLOs and integrate them into the software release pipeline?

In this episode I’ll host Andreas Grabner. We’ll discuss the SRE practices, and how to automate SLO from dev all the way to prod. We’ll talk about the open source efforts to standardize the process under the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and about Keptn, the new CNCF open source project that promises to help with this automation.

Andreas Grabner (@grabnerandi) has 20+ years of experience as a software developer, tester and architect and is an advocate for high-performing cloud scale applications. He is a contributor and DevRel for the CNCF open source project keptn (www.keptn.sh). Andreas is also a regular contributor to the DevOps community, a frequent speaker at technology conferences and regularly publishes articles on blog.dynatrace.com or medium. In his spare time you can most likely find him on one of the salsa dancefloors of the world.

What does it take to build observability in a web-scale company such as Slack, Pinterest and Twitter?

On this episode of OpenObsevability Talks I'll host Suman Karumuri to hear how he built these systems from the ground up on these #BigTech co's, about his recent research papers and more.

Suman Karumuri is a Sr. Staff Software Engineer and the tech lead for Observability at Slack. Suman Karumuri is an expert in distributed tracing and was a tech lead of Zipkin and a co-author of OpenTracing standard, a Linux Foundation project via the CNCF. Previously, Suman Karumuri has spent several years building and operating petabyte scale log search, distributed tracing and metrics systems at Pinterest, Twitter and Amazon.  In his spare time, he enjoys board games, hiking and playing with his kids.

SaaS (software as a service) is a popular model for many businesses today. SaaS businesses need agility to move fast and remain competitive. This means agility in the software IT stack, but also agility in the business models and product-led growth (PLG). Observability plays a key role in enabling SaaS organizations to move fast.

Achieving this agility, however, raises specific observability requirements. On this episode of OpenObservability Talks we’ll host Aviad Mizrachi, the CTO and Co-Founder of Frontegg, to help us map these requirements. Having escorted dozens of SaaS businesses across many verticals, Aviad brings a wealth of experience in how today’s SaaS is built and operated, and will share his insights and best practices on how to design and build the observability stack right.

Aviad has been a developer for the last 20 years. He held a few management and architecture positions on startups such as Vicon and HTS as well as in larger companies such as NICE and CheckPoint. Today at Frontegg Aviad works closely with many customers to help them build their SaaS solutions.

We’ve grown to rely on “the three pillars” for observability - logs, metrics and traces. Popular frameworks such as Prometheus have helped popularize these practices. But now people are starting to realize that it’s not enough.

On this episode Dotan Horovits will host Frederic Branczyk for a discussion about the unspoken pitfalls of Prometheus and the challenges of current observability coverage. We will also discuss the rise of Continuous Profiling as a new observability signal, what it’s about and where it can help. We’ll also review the recent launch of Parca, an open source project for continuous profiling that traces its roots to Red Hat’s internal ConProf open source tool.

Frederic is the founder and CEO of Polar Signals. Before founding Polar Signals he was a senior principal engineer and the main architect for all things Observability at Red Hat, which he joined through the CoreOS acquisition. Frederic is a Prometheus and Thanos maintainer as well as the tech lead for the special interest group for instrumentation in Kubernetes. In a previous life, he was a security researcher working on key management solutions as well as intrusion detection systems. When not working on software Frederic enjoys obsessing over brewing a perfect cup of coffee.

OpenObservability Talks S2E06: Hosting Steve McCanne  

We hear a lot about BPF in the industry today, applying this flexible technology to solve so many problems from routing, proxying, and of course observability. Correlating events and data from the operating system level across distributed systems is a key problem for the industry and community to solve. I am thrilled to announce Steve McCanne joining us for this episode. I have been lucky enough to spend time with Steve in my career and am delighted to have him join us to discuss the origin stories and where these foundational technologies might be applied in the future. Steve’s Bio and background speak for themselves.  

Steve McCanne is the "Coding CEO" at Brim, a small startup working on the open-source Zed Project and a new application called "Brim" that leverages Zed. Back in the days before the Web, Steve worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he developed BPF, libpcap, the PCAP file format, and the tcpdump language and compiler, while also working on the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) for Internet video when the telcos claimed that real-time Internet communication was impossible without end-to-end virtual-circuit guarantees. (Guess who was right?) After a brief stint in academia in the late '90s, Steve crossed over to the dark side, became a tech entrepreneur, and never looked back. He has founded several startups and took his '02 company and Sharkfest's sponsor, Riverbed, public in '06.  

Resources  

The USENEX paper from 1993 on BPF architecture:  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sd93/mccanne.pdf  

Open source tools Steve shared in the podcast:
https://github.com/brimdata/zed https://github.com/brimdata/brim  

Steve's GitHub BPF repo: https://github.com/brimdata/zbpf  
Socials:

Have you ever wondered how services are operated at Google’s scale? Here’s your opportunity to find out. Ramón will share how his SRE team runs Google’s identity services, and the elaborate end-to-end observability they use to achieve it with strict SLA. We’ll also get a glimpse at the birthplace of Kubernetes, OpenCensus, Dapper, Monarch and other cornerstones of today’s cloud-native DevOps and observability.

Observability is becoming a common practice for DevOps teams monitoring and troubleshooting IT systems. But Observability can offer much more than that. More advanced usage of telemetry, and in particular distributed tracing and its context propagation mechanism, can uncover insights into your business performance and can help solve business and FinOps problems.

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Yuri Shkuro, creator of Jaeger project and a champion of Distributed Tracing, to discuss how tracing and observability can help beyond DevOps, whether on business cases, FinOps or even software development. We also caught up on the latest updates from Jaeger, the CNCF’s distributed tracing OSS project, its synergy with OpenTelemetry and more topics.

Yuri is a software engineer who works on distributed tracing, observability, reliability, and performance problems; author of the book "Mastering Distributed Tracing"; creator of Jaeger, an open source distributed tracing platform and a graduated CNCF project; co-founder of the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry CNCF projects; member of the W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group.

The CNCF has a rich suite to address monitoring Kubernetes and cloud-native workloads. First of which is Prometheus, which is widely adopted, with great out-of-the-box compatibility with Kubernetes. But under the CNCF you can also find OpenMetrics that offers standardization of the metrics format, Thanos and Cortex which offer long-term storage for Prometheus, and other complimentary solutions and integrations.   

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks we’ll host “RichiH” Hartmann and discuss the different OSS projects, the synergy between them, and the future roadmap in building the community and making CNCF a leading offering.  

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann is Director of Community at Grafana Labs, Prometheus team member, OpenMetrics founder, CNCF SIG Observability chair, and other things. He also organizes various conferences, including FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, and built a datacenter from scratch.

Current observability practice is largely based on manual instrumentation, which creates a barrier to entry for many wishing to implement observability in their environment. This is especially true in Kubernetes environments and microservices architecture.

eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is an exciting new technology for Linux kernel level instrumentation, which bears the promise of no-code instrumentation and easier observability into Kubernetes environments (alongside other benefits for networking and security).

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks we’ll host Natalie Serrino, Principal Engineer at Pixie Labs, which was recently acquired by New Relic. We’ll talk about observability in Kubernetes environments, eBPF and its use cases for observability.

We’ll also talk about Pixie, the Kubernetes-native in-cluster observability platform, and the exciting news of it being open sourced and contributed these days to CNCF under Apache 2.0 license.

Natalie is a Principal Engineer and Tech Lead at New Relic. She works on the Pixie auto-telemetry observability platform, which was acquired and open sourced by New Relic. She focuses primarily on Pixie’s data layer, including its query language, compiler, and query execution engine.

OpenSearch project was born out of the passion for Elasticsearch and Kibana and the desire to keep them open source in the face of Elastic’s decision to close-source them. After a couple of months of hard work led by AWS, the Beta release was announced earlier this month under Apache2 license.

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Kyle Davis, Senior Developer Advocate for OpenSearch at AWS. We talked about how OpenSearch came to be, what it took to fork Elasticsearch and Kibana, what the engineers discovered when they dug into the code, what’s planned ahead, and much more.

About Kyle Davis: While being a relative newcomer to Amazon, Kyle has a long history with software development and databases. When not working, Kyle enjoys 3D printing, and getting his hand dirty in his Edmonton, Alberta-based home garden.

The seventh of our OpenObservability Talks has Andy Thurai, Senior Analyst at GigaOM.

Jonah Kowall, CTO and Andy Thurai will talk about Andy's career and journey as a vendor and an analyst. We will discuss the observability market along with APM and other aspects of monitoring. We will then dive into the open-source ecosystem and how this is changing vendor thinking. Of course, we'll also be discussing OpenTelemetry!

Andy Thurai is the Founder & Principal at the FieldCTO providing content and advisory services to enterprise customers in particular on AIOps, CloudOps, AI, ML, and Observability areas.

He is an accomplished IT executive, strategist, advisor and evangelist with 25+ years of experience in executive, technical and architectural leadership positions at companies such as IBM, Intel, BMC, Nortel and Oracle; he advises many start-ups, and he is a Steering Committee Member for AIOps Exchange. He has been a keynote speaker in many major conferences, as well as a host of many webcasts, podcasts and video chats. He is a regular Forbes contributor and has written 100+ articles on emerging technology topics for publications such as Forbes, AI World, VentureBeat and Wired. Andy Thurai can be reached on Twitter at @AndyThurai, or on LinkedIn.

The sixth of our OpenObservability Talks has Avishai Ish-Shalom, Developer Advocate at ScyllaDB.

We trust our metrics to show us the status of our system and where it misbehaves. But do our metrics show us what really happened? You'd be surprised how often it's not the case. 

On this episode we discussed the math behind metrics, some common misconceptions, what it take to have accurate metrics, and if there even is such a thing.

Avishai Ish-Shalom has served as Engineer in Residence in Aleph VC, engineering manager at Wix.com, co-founded Fewbytes and consulted many other companies on software operations, reliability, design and culture. Currently Avishai is a Developer Advocate for ScyllaDB, the open source NoSQL database.

The fifth of our OpenObservability Talks has Michael Haberman, CTO & Co-Founder of Aspecto.

There's a lot of discussion on how to achieve observability in microservices. Most of the discussion revolves around production workflows such as granular monitoring or debugging of complex environments.

A much less discussed aspect is the development stage, before even reaching production. In this talk we will discuss the challenges of microservices environments, and how to leverage tracing for pre-production purposes such as improving your tests, understand dependencies and more.

Michael Haberman is a veteran in the microservices space and brings significant experience as a software architect and a consultant. Michael  shared his experience on achieving observability in microservices environments in general, and during development stages in particular, with some useful tips on how to solve production issues, before they reach production.