OpenObservability Talks

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.

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.

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 we’ll host Yuri Shkuro, 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’ll also catch 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 we 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.

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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.

The fourth of our OpenObservability Talks has Albert Teoh from the Jaeger project.

Distributed tracing has been gaining momentum with the growing popularity of microservices. Jaeger is a popular open source tool originally developed at Uber and now part of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation).

Albert had been working at Uber for the past 2.5 years, where he got hands-on with Jaeger. On this talk Albert will share with us his experience with distributed tracing, from introducing it into new code all the way to production. Albert will explain important concepts and considerations, and will discuss common challenges and solutions in introducing distributed tracing in an existing large scale system.

Episode 3 of OpenObservability Talks, where we'll be hosting Matt Schallert of  Chronosphere. The topic for this episode is Long-Term Metrics with M3 and Prometheus.

Prometheus is the de facto solution when getting started with metrics, supporting use cases where a single node can store the entire dataset. When it comes to scaling out workloads or storing long-term data, Prometheus offers the Remote Write and Read interfaces to integrate with other storage solutions. 

In this talk, Matt will show attendees how they can scale their existing Prometheus metrics workloads with M3, an open-source metrics platform originated at Uber. Matt will discuss the background of Prometheus’s remote storage interfaces, and how they enable users to integrate with any number of systems they’re familiar with. He will demonstrate how quickly users can get an M3 stack up and running and integrate it with Prometheus.

The audience will walk away with a better understanding of the challenges of effectively scaling their metrics workloads, and how they can overcome these challenges with open source tools such as M3.

Episode 2 of OpenObservability Talks, where we'll be hosting Paul Bruce of  Neotys and Jonah Kowall of Logz.io. Our topic of discussion today is OpenTelemetry and the thriving community around it.

Welcome to the first-ever OpenObservability Talks!