KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe - Workshops, architectures, and Chronosphere preview

It's that time of year again where the legions of cloud native and open source communities from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) gather for this semi-annual event, this time in Paris, France!

There are so many things going on there, from the pre-event Cloud Native Rejects from 17-18 March at ESpot in Paris. You will find an array of talks that, in theory, didn't make the selection for KubeCon and yet are so good we have two days of enjoying them.

This is followed by a day of co-located events, which are single day conferences targeting specific areas of technology and CNCF communities. This all happens on 19 March and see the website listing for exact locations of the event that interests you.

Finally, we get to spend 20-22 March in the Paris Expo Porte De Versailles with thousands of our favorite community members sharing information, workshops, talks, lightning talks, and a huge booth pavilion. 

Below you'll find all the fun and adventures that I have planned throughout the week in Paris.

I'm going to have a busy week and looking forward to the CNCF Ambassador activities as well as meeting with all my friends and colleagues from the community. Below are the activities, in chronological order, that I'm going to be a part of.

Cloud Native Rejects

I've often been a speaker, but this year I'm going to be a supporter instead. I'm attending and have a vested interest in the talk by Patrick Stevens on Sunday, 17 March:

Fluent Bit, the engine to power ChatOps

The key to successful ChatOps is to be able to identify the important information in a timely manner using the best communications channel for a team (which could range from Slack to a bespoke App), and then enable the ops team to take appropriate action.

The CNCF project, Fluent Bit, has a number of core characteristics (event-driven and stream analytics features) that allow us to recognize critical events and event patterns as they occur without losing the benefits of traditional log analytics and observability tools. Using Fluent Bit’s connectivity and extensibility allows us to spot critical events and immediately communicate with the right ops staff using social channels or apps in a flexible and versatile manner and return actions to trigger suitable Fluent Bit events. All of which creates the opportunity to react more quickly and even become proactive/preventative.

In this session, we’ll look at these capabilities of Fluent Bit that can help us not just get data to the tools for metrics visualization and alarms and post-event analysis but also help us to react more quickly and potentially preemptively and show a thought-provoking demo of how Fluent Bit could be used to help empower ops so that we can look after our ‘pets’ or avoid the ‘cattle’ stampeding.

Time: 15:10–15:40 (Europe/Paris) in the VIP Area

On Monday I'll be back for day two of Rejekts.

OpenShift Commons

On Tuesday, 19 March I've been invited to host a workshop at the OpenShift Commons co-located event at Gaumont Aquaboulevard. It's a bit of an incomplete agenda and website for the second part of that schedule, so you need to look at the tab Breakout Room A and I'm slotted into the Platforms Community Meetup and Breakout with a neat workshop concept starting at 11:00.

Choose Your Own Observability Adventure

Great observability begins with great instrumentation! We know it's hard to decide where to start your observability journey, so we've come up with a perfect introduction to observability workshop collection, getting you hands-on with the best open source cloud native observability projects available. Attendees can pick their own cloud native observability learning path (https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io) in this session from the following workshops: OpenTelemetry (traces) - Learn how to adopt OpenTelemetry by instrumenting a sample application with spans and metrics. You’ll leave with an understanding of how telemetry travels and be ready to bring OpenTelemetry to your project. The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-opentelemetry Prometheus (metrics) - During the workshop, you will install Prometheus, collect metrics, and learn how to effectively run it in your observability stack. The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-prometheus Fluent Bit (pipelines) - This workshop will guide you through the open source project Fluent Bit, what it is, a basic installation, and setting up a first cloud native observability pipeline project. The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-fluentbit Perses (visualization) - Great observability is impossible without great visualization! Learn how to adopt truly open visualization by installing Perses, exploring the provided tooling, tinkering with its API, and then get your hands dirty building your first dashboard in no time! The workshop is self-paced and available online, so attendees can continue to explore after the event: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-perses

This workshop is never the same twice as you the attendees choose from a list of CNCF cloud native observability technologies and get hands-on learning about metrics, data pipelines, traces, and data visualization. Each workshop is engaging and requires attendees to solve common challenges as they learn about the open source solutions that interest them the most!

KubeCon

That brings us to the main event, where we kick off on Wednesday, 20 March where I'll be joining our community of CNCF Ambassadors for breakfast after which I'll be joining a few sessions from speakers who are both friends and colleagues from my career.

In the evening I'll be at the Chronosphere booth #G20 until I'm called over to the Google booth #E2 for a fun lightning talk at 18:30 - 18:45.

Checking the pulse of your cloud native architecture

The daily choices you make as an engineer when shipping code contributes to the feedback loop. In cloud native environments a surprising amount of data is generated from the application layer down to infrastructure and along the delivery path. Regulatory and compliance pressures force us to store audit and observability data. Understanding the pressures on our engineering teams around the collection, storage, and maintenance of your cloud data can mean the difference between successful teams and burnout.  Let us take you on a journey, looking closely at the current state of observability based on a recent research conducted with 500 cloud native engineers and find out what it’s like to be in the trenches.

Thursday you'll find me at the Chronosphere both #G20 in the morning, with my afternoon spent attending various talks again by friends and colleagues. Friday I'll close out the Chronosphere booth #G20 and hit the road for home.