Eric D. Schabell: 2025

Thursday, February 6, 2025

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.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Next generation observability - An architectural introduction

next generation observability architecture
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.

Monday, January 6, 2025

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.

Friday, January 3, 2025

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.