Cloud Native Rejekts NA 2025 - Expanding Your Toolbox: Beginners Guide to Controlling Kubernetes Logs

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. Since my transfer from the application development domains to the cloud native observability domain more than three years ago, I've never missed a single CFP for this event. 

In the past I've shared observability topics in a session on Perses,  a session providing OpenTelemetry insights, and a session on integrating Fluent Bit with OpenTelemetry including a live demo. For Rejekts NA I've been accepted for a cloud native story helping developers gain control of their logs in Kubernetes environments while within their inner development loop.

 Below you will find the session title, abstract, and location details for this London based event.

My session will focus on Kubernetes logging and how to get some sort of control back as a developer working on applications and just wanting to zoom in on the 

Expanding Your Toolbox: Beginners Guide to Controlling Kubernetes Logs 

Drowning in logs from your Kubernetes clusters? Struggling to scale observability without overwhelming your telemetry systems? You're not alone—and there's a better way. In this talk, you’ll learn how to efficiently manage and streamline logging data from source to destination using telemetry pipelines.

We’ll walk through the key stages of a modern telemetry pipeline—collection, parsing, filtering, routing, and forwarding—demonstrating how to build powerful, flexible pipelines that can handle logs from any source to any destination. Along the way, you’ll see a live demo in a real Kubernetes environment, where we’ll deploy your first telemetry pipeline tailored to a real-world use case.

Whether you're debugging production issues, operating multi-tenant clusters, or just trying to cut through the noise, this session will give you the tools and patterns you need to simplify and scale log collection. Plus, you’ll get access to a self-paced, hands-on workshop to continue exploring after the session: o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-fluentbit.

This talk includes a 15-minute live demo showcasing key integration phases:

1. Deploying a real workload: Start with a Kubernetes cluster running a real application (a CMS) that generates log data.
2. 
   Installing a telemetry pipeline: Deploy a telemetry pipeline to the cluster to begin streaming logs from all containers.
3. Streaming to an output: Route collected logs to an external destination for analysis or storage.
4. Optimizing log volume: Refine the pipeline to filter out noisy or unnecessary logs—reducing telemetry costs and improving signal-to-noise ratio.
5. Filtering logs: Enrich logs with metadata, isolate error-level telemetry, and ensure only the necessary logs (e.g., error logs from the CMS) are exported securely from the cluster.

Date: 8 Nov 2025

Time: TBD

Room: TBD

The schedule has not been posted as of this writing, but watch for it online. Looking forward to seeing you there and sharing some real fun hands-on developer learning with Kubernetes and Fluent Bit.