O11y Architecture - Financial Payments Introduction

Back in September 2020 I was researching open source architectures, meaning looking at several customer solutions from my employer at the time and developing a generic view of these solutions for certain use cases.

One of the use cases is known as financial payments and back in 2020 I kicked off a series covering this architecture with the article Payments architecture - An introduction. The series consisted of six articles and covered architectural diagrams from logical, schematic, to detailed views of the various  use cases we uncovered. 

The architectures presented were based on open source cloud native technologies, such as containers, microservices, and a Kubernetes based container platform. The major omission in this series was to avoid discussing any aspect of cloud native observability. 

This series will take a look at fixing that omission with an open source standards based cloud native observability platform that helps DevOps teams control the speed, scale, and complexity of a cloud native world for their financial payments architecture.

KCD Czech & Slovak 2023: Engaging Your Execs - Telling Great Observability Tales Inspiring Action (slides + video)

Today I spoke at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Kubernetes Community Day (KCD) in Bratislava,Slovakia.

I've been to Bratislava in the past to keynote for another conference at the same location and was deeply impressed with the depth of knowledge walking around that university. 

 

I want to share the slides from my talk along with the abstract, so see below for both. The session was also recorded so will be sharing that when available too.

Techie Brekkie Bristol Meetup - Observability for you and me with OpenTelemetry

Over the last few weeks I've been put in contact with the Techie Brekkie Bristol meetup group who were looking for a speaker for this month. 

I'm always up for something new and this is the very first time I'll be presenting to a breakfast group in the early morning. 

After a few back and forth through email, I met with the organization. I gave them a list of possible topics that might be of interest from our active collection of talks and they have selected one.

I'll be there in Bristol, UK on the morning of 31 May 2023 to present the talk that covers getting started with OpenTelemetry for your tracing needs.

WTF is SRE 2023 - Telling Effective Tales About Production (slides + recording)

Spent this week in London at the WTF is SRE 2023 conference sharing some thoughts on how to tell more effective tales in your organization of effect change. 

It was the fourth edition of this event and they  pulled together four tracks; Observability, Reliability, DevEx and DevSecOps. 

You must be asking the same thing I was when I first saw this conference, what is WTF is SRE? Well as they say on their site, "It is a highly-rated, very-tweeted-about, ridiculously-fun, wildly-insightful two-day conference designed to improve the world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)."

As you can tell from the tone and style, these have got to be some really fun people to hang out with for a few days, so here's my thoughts and the slides from my talk.

Getting Started with Prometheus - Using Advanced Queries

Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? 

Are you interested in open source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in? 

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Dive right into a free, online, self paced, hands-on workshop introducing you to Prometheus. Prometheus is an open source systems monitoring and alerting tool kit that enables you to hit the ground running with discovering, collecting, and querying your observability today. Over the course of this workshop you will learn what Prometheus is, what it is not, install it, start collecting metrics, and learn all the things you need to know to become effective at running Prometheus in your observability stack. 

Previously, I shared an introduction to Prometheus, installing Prometheus, an introduction to the query language, and exploring basic queries as free online worksop labs. In this article you'll continue your journey using advanced Prometheus queries with PromQL .