A Preview of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Observability Track
Honeycomb sponsored this post.
It’s been almost a year since the last KubeCon North America in San Diego, where I live-demoed OpenTelemetry on the keynote stage and highlighted our alpha to the world. The project has advanced considerably in the last year, and we’re excited to be entering general availability soon. While I’ll miss the energy from the packed crowd of over 10,000 technologists cheering me on, I’m delighted that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation/KubeCon North America event this year is more accessible than ever to a worldwide audience. With tickets set at $100 and no travel required, it’s the perfect opportunity to learn about OpenTelemetry and other cloud native technologies from the comfort of your desk, no matter what your employer’s travel budget is.
Over the past year, we’ve seen increasing clarity from analysts, vendors and end users, who all agree that observability is critical to realizing the productivity and scaling benefits of the cloud native journey. Observability, the capacity to understand our systems in flight, arises when our business’ software systems and our people are functioning in concert. Robust telemetry (such as logs, traces, and/or metrics) is necessary but not sufficient to achieve meaningful observability. We only see the benefits of our telemetry when we can interrogate that data and enhance our understanding of our systems, which is what enables us to operate our systems safely through launch, turmoil, and calm.
With the community uniting around OpenTelemetry (OTel) as a standard, vendors and end users have collaborated to build instrumentation code directly into the most popular frameworks, producing telemetry that’s compatible with both popular open source solutions and proprietary providers. OpenTelemetry decouples the telemetry production from consumption, which means you’re not tied to a specific vendor or backend. Dozens of prominent companies and open source projects use OpenTelemetry in production to empower observability outcomes. Given how quickly best practices are evolving, CNCF/KubeCon offers a great chance to learn from your peers, both about the technology choices required to plant the seed of observability, as well as the culture that allows it to flourish.
This year, I have the pleasure of kicking off OpenTelemetry Community Day on Day 0, as well as co-chairing the Observability track at CNCF/KubeCon. Here’s what I’m looking forward to:
- The History of OpenTelemetry at Community Day, detailing how the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects merged, and the upcoming General Availability of the Tracing and Metrics APIs and SDKs.
- Breakout discussion groups/birds of feathers at OTel Community Day, held in Open Spaces unconference format. Share experiences with other OTel users, or help triage the remaining GA backlog, or grab a seat and learn how to get started!
- Getting Involved in the OTel Community if you’re curious how to not just consume, but contribute back to OTel!
- Empowering End Users with the OpenTelemetry Collector — how to change telemetry backends with just one line of config, and no code changes!
- SLO-driven Kubernetes Cluster Reliability in the Observability track, including defining SLOs for your Kubernetes cluster and tracing performance problems.
- Applying Observability to Deploy 5G in the Observability track, including integration of Jaeger and Prometheus.
It’s not too late to register both for KubeCon and for the OpenTelemetry Community Summit. Tickets are $100 for KubeCon itself and another $30 for the co-hosted OpenTelemetry Community Day event. And while you’re at the event, don’t forget to stop by the Honeycomb booth to pick up a virtual OpenTelemetry Starter Kit.
Considering an open-source backend for your telemetry data? Honeycomb’s Open Source Observability Guide helps you evaluate the TCO of running your own open source backend vs using a managed service.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and KubeCon+CloudNativeCon are sponsors of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
