Cloud Native London Meetup - Cloud Native Bedtime Stories

I'm heading back to visit my good friends at the Cloud Native London meetup, having been given the opportunity to present again after my first visit in January of this year.

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.

That session I presented in January was about the pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data and they live streamed it with a recording available online if you want to revisit.

Now let's take a look at what this meetup looks like on Wednesday, 4 Oct in London.

Infobip Shift Conference 2023 - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data (slides)

As I mentioned previously, I'm speaking today at this year's Shift Conference.

I was on stage to share some thoughts and insights into the 3 pitfalls I think everyone should be aware of and avoid with regards to their cloud data.

To ensure you can get your hands on the slides, I'm going to share them here.

Getting Started with Prometheus - Instrumenting Applications

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, exploring basic queries, using advanced queries, relabeling metrics in Prometheus, and discovering service targets as free online labs. In this article you'll learn all about instrumenting your applications using Prometheus client libraries.

SRECon EU 2023 - The road to Dublin

"SREcon23 Europe/Middle East/Africa is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. SREcon strives to challenge both those new to the profession as well as those who have been involved in it for decades. The conference has a culture of critical thought, deep technical insights, continuous improvement, and innovation."

This is SRECon23 EU and with it being in Dublin from 10-12 Oct this year, I couldn't resist submitting a few of my cloud native observability ideas. They had the entire spectrum of session types, including lightning talks, so I pushed in a few for each category.

The final selection was just last week and they seem keen to see one of my lightning talks. Let's see what they found to be the most interesting idea I pushed in for their call for papers.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA - Roadmap to Becoming a CNCF Ambassador

This year the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is hosting it's bi-annual event KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA in Chicago from 6-9 November 2023.

I continue to submit to both the EU and NA editions, with varying success to date. This year was no different and I submitted two sessions. 

The first was a workshop / tutorial type of session and the second was a bit of an outlier where I teamed up with a surprise co-speaker.

The schedule was posted this last week and one of my sessions was accepted, so let's see what I submitted and what will be on the schedule in Chicago in November.

All Things Open 2023 - Terrifying Execs into Action

I've always been a regular visitor to the All Things Open conferences, as they have a rock start organization since they started and put on a great annual event in the city of Raleigh, NC.

That being said, I've not been in attendance since 2018 when I gave a main stage lighting talk that was recorded. The reason for the break is pretty obvious and now that the event is back on in person, I was all in on the call for papers.

The selection committee was kind enough to select one of my favorite topics that I've been working on to address different audiences, but that helps you personally tell your stories effectively and move people to action.

Let's look at the abstract and details of my session for All Things Open in October.

Getting Started with Prometheus - Discovering Service Targets

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, exploring basic queries, using advanced queries, and relabeling metrics in Prometheus as free online labs. In this article you'll learn all about discovering service targets in Prometheus.

DataOps Day 2023 - Optimizing Observability Spend: Metrics (slides)

As previously posted, I presented at the DataOps Day event on 16 Aug. 

The entire day was focused on a deep dive into the world of data and DataOps. Register for free to join this online event (or to browse the post-event recordings) and hear from data and business leaders who have adopted DataOps to achieve their goals for quality, security and speed.

I'm sharing some insights into the need for organizations to understand and adopt the Observability Data Optimization Cycle to survive the crush of cloud native observability data coming at them.

To gain some insights, let's take a look at the details of my session and explore the slides.

KCD Denmark - The first ever Kubernetes Community Days in Denmark

When I saw that they were going to host the first ever Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) in Denmark on 14 November, I had to apply.

It is a pretty active CNCF community that organizes many KCD events throughout the year across the globe and being a CNCF Ambassador I am always trying to support what my schedule will allow.

It was even more exciting to see that this KCD has offered slots for workshop content, where 25 attendees get to sit down in a room and go diving into hands-on content around CNCF projects. I had to try this out and submit one of my workshops.

PromCon EU 2023 - Heading to Berlin with Dashboards and Compliance

This year PromCon EU is being held in Berlin, Germany on Sep 28-29. It will be my second edition and I'm looking forward to the two days of all things Prometheus and cloud native observability.

I've yet to speak at one of these events, but this time around I wanted to share two different sessions, one is a lightning talk introduction to a workshop I've put together. The second one is a regular talk on the topic of the Prometheus Compliance Program which I've spent some time digging into to validate my employers compliance with the standards. 

I think they are good topics to share and help others getting started with these areas of Prometheus and integration with Prometheus.

Infobip Shift Conference 2023 - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data

Back in 2018 I was exposed for the first time to an amazing conference then known as Shift Developer Conference. It was an amazing location in Split, Croatia and one of the founders, Ivan Burazin quickly became a good friend.

I spoke on the main stage which was hosted in the Croatian National Opera House, something that remains both a special experience and was recorded. 

I've stayed in contact with Ivan over the years and wanted to return, but pandemics and other events kept me away, until this year. I bumped into Ivan at last year's KubeCon NA in Detroit, MA and while catching up on his activities he encouraged me to submit some talks right away.

So I did.

This year's Shift Conference is from 18-19 Sep and word on the street is that they are looking at around 5000 attendees. Below you will find the outline of my talk. 

DataOps Day 2023 - Optimizing Observability Spend: Metrics (accepted)

On August 16, from 09:00 - 15:00 ET, Techstrong is putting on a free virtual event called DataOps Day 2023 and I've been invited to share insights into optimizing your cloud native observability spend. 

As they state on the event site in the introduction, data is the crown jewels of an organization, empowering companies to make informed business decisions, improve operations, reduce costs and increase revenue. Organizations are increasingly adopting DataOps to get full visibility and control of their data pipeline, boost efficiency and quality of data, fuel digital transformation initiatives and maximize business value.

At DataOps Day, you'll be able to take a deep dive into the world of data and DataOps. Register for free to join this online event to hear from data and business leaders who have adopted DataOps to achieve their goals for quality, security and speed.

Let's take a look at the details of my session.