Cloud Native Los Angeles: Observability-as-a-Service (slides)

As mentioned previously, Graziano Casto and I presented an online session for the Cloud Native Los Angeles meetup. We shared our thoughts on the subject of Observability-as-a-Service as related to when Platform Engineering and SRE teams work together. 

The CNCF's Los Angeles (LA) community group represents the LA cloud native community and aims to promote and champion CNCF and open source technology as well as help network and collaborate. To that end, we are contributing whole heartedly!

By combining our personal experiences and expertise in Platform Engineering and Cloud Native Observability, we think this session provides good insights into how one can leverage the two disciplines to better our developer team's experiences.

We had a small live audience, but the talk was recorded, so I'm sharing our slide deck, the talk abstract, and the recording when it's available.

Mastering Fluent Bit: Installing Fluent Bit from Source

This series is a general purpose getting started guide for those of us wanting to learn about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project Fluent Bit. 

Each article in this series addresses a single topic by providing insights into what the topic is, why we are interested in exploring that topic, where to get started with the topic, and how to get hands-on with learning about the topic as it relates to the Fluent Bit project.

The idea is that each article can stand on it's own, but that they also lead down a path that slowly increases our abilities to implement solutions with Fluent Bit telemetry pipelines.

Let's take a look a the topic of this article, installing Fluent Bit from the project source code.

Cloud Native London Meetup: Mastering Fluent Bit - Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry

Back on 7 Aug 2024 I was to speak at the Cloud Native London meetup, having been given the opportunity to present due to a speaker canceling at the last minute. I really like the organization and the consistently high volume of smart attendees to test out my ideas, so I was really excited to share an integration story with them about Fluent Bit and OpenTelemetry.

Instead, there was an evacuation of the area due to expected riots in the UK and the event was cancelled.

Fast-forward, it's now finally going to happen on 7 May 2025 with a more polished version than I would have brought back in the late summer of 2024. 

Tech Meetup Glasgow - Mastering Fluent Bit: Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry

The last time I was in Glasgow was for the Tech Meetup in July 2024. I spent the evening sharing the basics of OpenTelemetry and provided hands-on workshop content for all attendees to try out at home.

On 1 May 2025 I'm headed back to the Tech Meetup Glasgow, but this time I'm going to take them on a live demo ride with Fluent Bit and OpenTelemetry!

The meetup started in the Edinburgh area, but has also expanded into the Glasgow tech community. It welcomes people with all levels of experience, even if you are starting your journey into tech as a student, boot camper, or you're thinking of starting your development career, you are more than welcome.

I'm going to be sharing an introduction to Fluent Bit pipelines and OpenTelemetry Collector, then live demo the complete integration story to showcase it from front to back.

Cloud Native Los Angeles: Observability-as-a-Service

On Friday, 11 April 2025 both Graziano Casto and I will be presenting an online session for the Cloud Native Los Angeles meetup, sharing our thoughts on the subject of Observability-as-a-Service. 

The CNCF's Los Angeles (LA) community group represents the LA cloud native community and aims to promote and champion CNCF and open source technology as well as help network and collaborate. To that end, we are contributing whole heartedly!

By combining our personal experiences and expertise in Platform Engineering and Cloud Native Observability, we think this session provides good insights into how one can leverage the two disciplines to better our developer team's experiences.

Join us on this journey.

Cloud Native Rejekts London: Mastering Fluent Bit - Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry (slides + video)

Today, as previously mentioned, I presented a fun hands-on session at Cloud Native Rejekts in London. 

This event was started by a Netherlands based organization, hence the unique Dutch spelling of the word rejekts, and is meant to be a second chance for talks not accepted into the main CNCF event.In the past I've spoken at the North American event sharing a session on Perses, and at the European event sharing OpenTelemetry insights. 

Today I shared a live demo session focused on integrating Fluent Bit with OpenTelemetry. Below you will find the session recording (video), slides and abstract.

SREDay London 2025: When Platform Engineers meet SREs (slides)

 Today as previously mentioned, with my co-presenter Graziano Casto, we've shared our story at SREday London.

This event is two days and focused on Site Reliability, DevOps, and Cloud with three tracks of talks. The venue will be the Everyman Canary Wharf, a rather hip location for this event and should be a lot of fun meeting with attendees and speakers.

This collaboration story is about bringing observability to the foundations of your developer experience, ensuring it's a first class citizen in the platforms you are engineering from day one while discovering that it's giving SREs their super powers.

Below you will find the slides, the abstract, and our thanks for attending this event. 

SREDay London 2025: When Platform Engineers meet SREs

I'm going to be at SREday London from 27-28 Mar 2025 with my co-presenter Graziano Casto, developer relations engineer at Mia-Platform sharing a platform engineering meets SRE story.

This event is two days and focused on Site Reliability, DevOps, and Cloud with three tracks of talks. The venue will be the Everyman Canary Wharf, a rather hip location for this event and should be a lot of fun meeting with attendees and speakers.

Graziano and I met a few years ago at Platmosphere and we've since been sharing topics of platform engineering and observability. This has led us to several events, including SREDay in Amsterdam last year and now London this year!

Below you will find the abstract for the story we plan to share.

Cloud Native Rejekts London: Mastering Fluent Bit - Ultimate Guide to Integrating Telemetry Pipelines with OpenTelemetry

One of the really fun events around the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) flagship event KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is Cloud Native Rejekts. This event started by a Netherlands based organization, hence the unique Dutch spelling of the word rejects, and is meant to be a second chance for talks not accepted into the main CNCF event.

I love the idea of second chances and believe many of the talks given at Cloud Native Rejekts should have been in the main event. Quality and quantity of these talks is often astounding. Since my transfer from the application development domains to the cloud native observability domain more than two years ago, I've never missed a single CFP for this event. 

In the past I've spoken at the North American event sharing a session on Perses, and at the European event sharing OpenTelemetry insights. This year I've been selected to the Cloud Native Rejekts EU event with a session sharing what integrating Fluent Bit with OpenTelemetry looks like, including live demo components.

Devoxx UK 2025: Meet the New Kid in the Sandbox - Integrating Visualization with Prometheus

I've been a regular fan of the Devoxx events over the years, speaking multiple times at both the Belgian and UK versions. I've shared on topics covering application development, developer productivity, cloud development, and architecture through the years. 

My last appearance was at Devoxx UK in 2022, so it is with great excitement that I'm sharing that I've gotten accepted for a cloud native observability session in my new domain of focus.

This year Devoxx UK 2025 conference is being held from May 7-9 in London. Being easily accessible for me so I'll be there to share some good basic insights into Perses, a CNCF Sandbox level visualization and dashboard project.

Next generation observability - An architectural introduction

Part 1 - Introduction

In a past life I spent many hours researching, creating, explaining, and publishing portfolio architectures across a collection of application development, domain verticals, infrastructure solutions, and hybrid cloud domains. Most of these concentrated on the application layers and their usage of the infrastructure.

Then I transitioned into the cloud native observability space and observability became the guiding light in my learning path. This quickly led to the realization that the same solution mapping that the previous portfolio architectures brought to organizations struggling with solving hard problems, also applied to the observability world. It's just a matter of a different angle in how we look at those solutions.

Early in 2023 I introduced the first changes to an existing Financial Payments architecture, publishing a short series where observability was included in the solution diagrams. As my learnings in the observability domain continued, this architectural need for a generic view of how to design a cloud native observability solution for any organization remained on my mind.

For the last few months, a small group has been digging into how to define the next generation observability architecture. This article is the first introduction to our findings.

Installing Fedora 41 on Macbook Pro 13 inch (late 2011)

This weekend I decided to update my old Macbook Pro 13 inch from late 2011, with 125GB SSD and 8GB RAM. 

It's a machine I've taken on trips around the world and back in the day ran many sessions, workshops, and demos sharing all that developer goodness.

Last time we checked, this was installed using Fedora 37, so how about an update to Fedora 41?

Below are the steps and adjustments needed to get Fedora 41 working on this laptops in no time.

O11y Guide: Finding observability and DevEx tranquility with Platform Engineering

Monitoring system behavior is essential for ensuring long-term effectiveness. However, managing an end-to-end observability stack can feel like sailing stormy seas—without a clear plan, you risk blowing off course into system complexities. 

By integrating observability as a first-class citizen within your platform engineering practices, you can simplify this challenge and stay on track in the ever-evolving cloud-native landscape.  

Entering the world of monitoring distributed systems is a journey made up of several stages which we will cover in the rest of this article.