They have +7,000 members and it is, "...the official Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Meetup group dedicated to building a strong, open, diverse developer community around the Cloud Native platform and technologies in London." You can also find them on their own slack channel, so feel free to drop in for a quick chat if you like.
There were over 85 attendees that braved the cold London evening to join us for pizza, drinks, and a bit of fun with my session having a special design this time around. I went out on a limb and tried something I've never seen before, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure presentation. Below I've included a description of how I think it went, the feedback I got, and where you can find both the slides and recording online if you missed it.
Previously, I posted that I would be in London and shared the following details:
The agenda for the January Cloud Native London Meetup is now up. If you're not able to join us, don't forget to update your RSVP before 10am on Wednesday! Or alternatively, join us via the Youtube stream without signing up.
Check out the three fantastic speakers we've got lined up for you on Wednesday 10 January:
- 18:00 Pizza and drinks
- 18:30 Welcome
- 18:45 Quickwit: Cloud-Native Logging and Distributed Tracing (Francois Massot, Quickwit)
- 19:15 - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Native Observability (Eric D. Schabell, Chronosphere)
- 19:45 Break
- 20:00 Transcending microservices hell for Supergraph Nirvana (Tom Harding, Hasura)
- 20:30 Wrap up
See you there!
As I mentioned, my talk is a new idea that I've been working on for the last year. I want to share insights into the mistakes and pitfalls that I'm seeing customers and practitioners make repeatedly on their cloud native observability journey.
Not only was it new ideas for content, I wanted to try something a bit more daring this time around and tried to engage the audience with a bit of choose-your-own-adventure in which they were choosing which pitfall would be covered next. I started with a generic introduction, then gave them the following six choices:
- Ignoring costs in application landscape
- Focusing on The Pillars
- Sneaky sprawling tooling mess
- Controlling costs
- Losing your way in the protocol jungles
- Underestimating cardinality
For the session last night we ended up doing, in this order, pitfalls #6, #3, and #4. This meant the session recording posted online from last nights event contained the following content:
- Introduction to cloud native and cloud native observability problems (framing the topic)
- Pitfall - Underestimating cardinality
- Pitfall - Sneaky sprawling tooling mess
- Pitfall - Controlling costs
And below the slides followed by the abstract:
Abstract:
Are you looking at your organization's efforts to enter or expand into the cloud native landscape and feeling a bit daunted by the vast expanse of information surrounding cloud native observability? When you're moving so fast with agile practices across your DevOps, SRE's, and platform engineering teams, it's no wonder this can seem a bit confusing. Unfortunately, the choices being made have a great impact on both your business, your budgets, and the ultimate success of your cloud native initiatives. That hasty decision up front leads to big headaches very quickly down the road. In this talk, I'll introduce the problem facing everyone with cloud native observability followed by 3 common mistakes that I'm seeing organizations make and how you can avoid them!
I am scheduled to come back in May to present again and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in London in the Spring!