OpenObservability Talks

KubeCon Europe 2025 in London has wrapped up, and we’re bringing you all the highlights, trends, and behind-the-scenes insights straight from the show floor!In this special recap episode, I’m joined by two CNCF Ambassadors and community powerhouses: Kasper Borg Nissen, the Co-Chair of this KubeCon as well as of the KubeCon 2024 editions, and a Developer Relations Engineer at Dash0; and William Rizzo, Consulting Architect at Mirantis and Linkerd Ambassador.Together, we unpack the major themes from the event—from platform engineering and internal developer platforms, to open source observability, and where Kubernetes is headed next. We also chat about the vibe of the community, emerging projects to watch, and important trends in European tech sphere.Whether you missed the conference or want to catch up on important updates you might have missed, this episode gives you a curated take straight from the experts who know the cloud-native space inside out.The episode was live-streamed on 22 April 2025 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyxJOmOEBvQYou can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/740258a5fa46OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠Show Notes:00:00 - intro03:28 - KubeCon impressions09:59 - Backstage turns 518:56 - CNCF turns 10 and CNCF annual survey27:22 - Sovereign cloud in Europe and the NeoNephos initiative33:55 - CI/CD use in production increases36:52 - OpenInfra joins the Linux Foundation40:16 - Cloud native local communities, DEI and the BIPOC initiative 51:11 - Observability query standardization SIG updates59:36 - outroResources:CNCF 2024 Annual Survey https://www.cncf.io/reports/cncf-annual-survey-2024/NeoNephos initiative for sovereign EU cloud: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7313115943075766273/ OpenInfra Foundation and OpenStack join The Linux Foundation: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7307839934072066048/ Backstage turns 5: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7318163557206966272/ Kubernetes 1.33 release: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7321054742174924800/Socials:Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠Dotan Horovits============Twitter: @horovitsLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovitsMastodon: @horovits@fosstodonBlueSky: @horovits.bsky.socialKasper Borg Nissen===============Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/phennexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaspernissen/BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/kaspernissen.xyz⁠William Rizzo===========Twitter: https://twitter.com/WilliamRizzo19LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-rizzo/BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/williamrizzo.bsky.social

Shopify operates at massive scale, running thousands of services and processing billions of events per second. To tackle the challenges of observability at this scale, they built Observe—an in-house observability stack that makes use of open-source tools and specifications. In fact, they replaced an older vendors-based system, in an awe-inspiring migration project. But why build their own stack? Which open source tools did they use? How did they shape the user experience to their needs?Joining us to unpack Shopify’s journey is Elijah McPherson, an engineering leader with deep expertise in observability and distributed systems. Elijah led the complete rebuild of Shopify’s observability stack and now also oversees jobs, caching, search, and ClickHouse infrastructure. Tune in to hear firsthand insights from one of the most innovative purpose-built observability implementations in production today!The episode was live-streamed on 11 February 2025 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBfTjlXKJW0OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠Show Notes:00:46 - Episode and guest intro03:43 - Why rebuild the observability stack in house 05:47 - Cost and vendor lock-in07:09 - Tailoring observability for the organizational processes10:27 - How to build a team to build in-house observability 13:37 - The importance of product sense in internal platforms18:05 - The functionality of Shopify’s observability platform 25:15 - The Open Source stack used at Shopify observability 29:50 - Extending open source Grafana to Shopify’s needs36:23 - Adopting open standards 42:26 - observability into business health45:16 - how to run a migration project for a live production platform53:15 - final tips and best practices 56:41 - which organizations should develop in-house observabilityResources: Episode: Scaling Platform Engineering: Shopify’s Blueprint: https://medium.com/p/f18e97140681 Shopify Observe - lectures: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elijahmcpherson_observe-activity-7258195493657223168-mOGS/ Socials:Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠Dotan Horovits============Twitter:@horovitsLinkedIn:www.linkedin.com/in/horovitsMastodon: @horovits@fosstodonBlueSky: @horovits.bsky.socialElijah McPherson===============Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElijahMcPhersonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elijahmcpherson/

In this special year-end episode of OpenObservability Talks, we are thrilled to host Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, for an insightful conversation on the state of observability. Charity and our host Horovits recently delivered keynotes at Open Source Observability Day, which sparked fascinating discussions on the evolution of open observability and its impact on the broader industry. Together, they run a 2024 yearly postmortem on the key insights and trends, exploring what the observability community and industry have accomplished this year. Looking ahead, they also discuss what’s on the horizon for observability in 2025 and beyond. Charity Majors pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O'Reilly). Join us for this fireside chat as we wrap up the year with the influential voices in observability. The episode was live-streamed on 9 December 2024 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7ssNKAmYMs You can read the recap post at https://medium.com/p/94f80fff77e8/ OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat. ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠ Show Notes: 00:00 - intro 01:51 - major observability trends of 2024 05:14 - OpenTelemetry trends 07:50 - Observability 2.0 14:45 - AI for DevOps and Observability 27:02 - Platform engineering 36:37 - observability query and data analytics 43:40 - observability for business insights 46:53 - how to start observability in Greenfield projects 50:15 - additional use cases for observability 54:11 - controlling cost of observability 58:47 - outro Resources: Practitioner's guide to wide events: https://jeremymorrell.dev/blog/a-practitioners-guide-to-wide-events/ Charity Major's blog on Observability 2.0: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/time-to-version-observability-signs-point-to-yes Observability Is A Data Analytics Problem: https://insideainews.com/2022/04/07/observability-is-a-data-analytics-problem/ Platform as a Product survey by the CNCF: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7267977952242397185/ SaaS observability: https://medium.com/p/b2db276305b2 Expensive Metrics: Why Your Monitoring Data and Bill Get Out Of Hand: https://medium.com/p/e5724619e3f1 Sampling best practices: https://logz.io/learn/sampling-in-distributed-tracing-guide/ Socials: Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: @horovits LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social Charity Majors ============ Twitter: https://x.com/mipsytipsy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charity-majors Mastodon: @mipsytipsy@hachyderm.io BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/mipsytipsy.bsky.social

In this episode of OpenObservability Talks, Dotan Horovits sits down with Yuri Shkuro, the creator of Jaeger, to unveil the highly anticipated Jaeger V2. This major release introduces a new architecture with deep OpenTelemetry integration, which promises more flexibility, performance, extensibility and ease of use. Join us as Yuri shares insider details on the challenges, innovations, and roadmap for Jaeger V2 towards a more efficient and scalable distributed tracing solution. Yuri is a software engineer who works on distributed tracing, observability, reliability, and performance problems, currently working at Meta; author of the book "Mastering Distributed Tracing"; creator of Jaeger, an open source distributed tracing platform originally developed at Uber; co-founder of the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry CNCF projects; member of the W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group. The episode was live-streamed on 14 October 2024, and the video is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=lICivVwm-F8. Check out the recap blog at: https://medium.com/p/be612dbee774/ OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat. ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠ Show Notes: 00:00 - Intro 00:45 - Open Source Observability Day 01:46 - Episode and guest intro 04:37 - Jaeger v1.x highlights 09:04 - Jaeger scope evolution from instrumentation to backend 13:36 - Jaeger v2 - why now? 20:26 - New architecture for V2 - learnings for SW engineering 26:53 - Jaeger persistence layer, and do we need tracing-specialized database? 35:35 - extending OpenTelemetry to manage storage for Jaeger 38:57 - RC1 is out, when is GA expected and what's expected? 43:24 - Breaking changes and migration path from v1 to v2 48:31 - What's expected for Jaeger UI 51:24 - New contributors joining through mentorship programs 54:47 - Observability at Meta/Facebook: machine learning, correlation, OpenTelemetry 1:01:04 - Outro Resources: https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/next-release-v2/getting-started/⁠ https://medium.com/jaegertracing/towards-jaeger-v2-moar-opentelemetry-2f8239bee48e https://horovits.medium.com/observability-into-your-finops-taking-distributed-tracing-beyond-monitoring-48a51e32e78a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35aInRLbTQo&list=PLd57eY2edRXz4djMETYTm-2p8WGTdoX3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l0HKUDoX4Q&list=PLd57eY2edRXz4djMETYTm-2p8WGTdoX3D https://research.facebook.com/publications/positional-paper-schema-first-application-telemetry/⁠ ⁠ https://research.facebook.com/publications/scuba-diving-into-data-at-facebook/⁠ ⁠ https://osoday.com/⁠ Socials: Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: @horovits LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social Yuri Shkuro ========== Twitter: https://twitter.com/YuriShkuro LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yurishkuro/

OpenShift is an open-source container application platform that brings Docker and Kubernetes together to help organizations build, deploy, and manage containerized applications. Open source OpenShift (OKD) powers some of the largest Kubernetes clusters, such as in CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Join us for a fireside chat with an OpenShift veteran Radek Vokál, on the current state of the OpenShift project, its vibrant community, and the pivotal role Red Hat plays in its development and growth. In this episode we delved into how observability is integrated within OpenShift, discussing key strategies, tools and open source projects for effective monitoring, troubleshooting and cost management. Whether you're managing complex deployments or seeking to enhance system performance, this episode offers valuable insights and practical guidance on leveraging OpenShift for improved observability. Don't miss this in-depth discussion! Our guest is Radek Vokál, Senior Manager, Red Hat Observability Product Management. With 20 years at Red Hat, Radek has been involved in OpenShift from engineering and product side. Radek currently leads product management for the OpenShift Observability. Radek has also been a co-organizer of the DevConf.cz open source community conference in the Czech Republic for the last 17 years. The episode was live-streamed on 8 August 2024 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPNHJ7Nn8uA OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat. ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠ Show Notes: 00:00 Episode and guest intro 06:29 What's OpenShift 10:22 OKD (OpenShift Core) open source 14:49 Product management for open source 19:27 Cost and resource efficiency of Kubernetes clusters 30:06 Observability at OpenShift 39:54 Open source observability stack used at OpenShift 42:12 Moving away from Grafana and adopting Perses OSS 45:04 OpenShift roadmap 48:40 Adopting OpenTelemetry 56:52 CrowdStrike and Azure outages 58:15 AWS taking down a suite of services 1:00:28 Jaeger V2 is coming 1:02:45 Episode outro Resources: https://okd.io/ https://www.redhat.com/observability https://github.com/korrel8r/korrel8r https://horovits.medium.com/033e7518eefb https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7223575687339622400/ Socials: Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: @horovits LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon Radek Vokál ========== Twitter: x.com/radekvokal LInkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/radekvokal/

Redis is no longer open source. Just a few months ago, in March 2024, the project was relicensed, leaving its vast community confused. But the community did not give up, and started work to fork Redis to keep it open. In this episode, we delve into the Valkey project, a prominent fork of Redis, established under the Linux Foundation, which brought together important figures from the Redis community, as well as leading industry giants including AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and others. Valkey has rapidly gained momentum and just reached General Availability (GA). Join us as we explore the motivations behind Valkey's creation, hear first-hand stories on its foundation and journey to GA, and learn of its Redis compatibility, roadmap and implications for the open-source community. Valkey's first Contributor Summit is taking place June 5-6 in Seattle and we will bring you announcements and updates hot off the summit. Our guest is Kyle Davis, the Senior Developer Advocate on the Valkey project, and a past contributor for Redis. Kyle currently works at AWS, a founding member of Valkey, and has a long history with open source and with forks. He was a founding contributor to the OpenSearch project, which started as a fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana after the latter's relicensing off OSS. Most recently Kyle worked to build a community around Bottlerocket OSS project. The episode was live-streamed on 10 June 2024 and the video is available at youtube.com/live/HQ7TAdQpxu4 OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat. ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠ Show Notes: 01:12 - Episode intro, Kyle Davis’ Redis background 05:43 - Redis relicensing off open source 10:10 - Valkey vs. other Redis open source forks 16:50 - drop-in replacement of Redis 19:35 - Redis user experience during the relicensing 28:50 - From fork to GA in less than a month 34:00 - Valkey roadmap and Contributor Summit updates 40:00 - Valkey’s Technical Steering Committee and leadership 44:14 - what Valkey latest GA is about Resources: Valkey announced: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_redis-opensource-activity-7179186700470861824-Gghq Valkey first GA and new member companies: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_redis-valkey-valkey-activity-7186263342041198593-fsY3 Announcements from Valkey's first Contributor Summit: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/horovits_valkey-welcomes-new-partners-amid-growing-activity-7209084153718362112-OfdI/ For Kubernetes 10th anniversary - special episode with Kelsey Hightower: https://logz.io/blog/kubernetes-and-beyond-2023-reflection/?utm_source=devrel&utm_medium=devrel Socials: Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: @horovits LinkedIn: in/horovits Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon Kyle Davis ======== LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kyle-davis-linux/ Mastodon: @linux_mclinuxface@fosstodon.org

KubeCon Europe 2024 in Paris was the biggest event of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to date, with over 12k participants. Have you missed it? We've got you covered! Join not one but two CNCF Ambassadors as they explore the latest and greatest highlights from the event that every tech enthusiast is talking about. But that's not all! We'll also zoom in on K8sgpt, a new entrant to the CNCF’s sandbox that uses generative AI to give Kubernetes superpowers to everyone. Does this open source project go beyond the GenAI hype and get us closer to diagnosing and triaging issues in plain English? Let’s ask the maintainers behind the project. Our guest is Thomas Schuetz, a Principal Cloud Architect with a keen interest in cloud-native application delivery. Thomas teaches at an Austrian University of Applied Sciences, focusing on cloud-native technologies. Thomas is enthusiastic about open source projects, contributing as a Keptn GC Member and K8sGPT Maintainer, alongside his role as Co-Chair of the CNCF TAG App Delivery. He also brings a deep industry background from his past roles at Dynatrace and more. The episode was live-streamed on 14 April 2024 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr3viuhssdg OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube. We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat. https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks ⁠https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability⁠ Show Notes: 00:00 - Show intro 00:59 - Episode and guest intro 03:15 - Redis moves off open source 05:21 - AI white paper 07:47 - TAG App Delivery updates 12:15 - Istio beta release of ambient mode 12:57 - Fluent Bit v3 major release 13:57 - Keptn project updates 17:20 - OpenCost adds environment sustainability 18:43 - OpenFeature adds client-side support with web SDK v1 20:08 - Perses 0.44 release 21:40 - K8sGPT founding team 24:07 - K8sGPT intro 27:36 - how K8sGPT works 31:28 - no vendor behind K8sGPT 36:10 - integration with multiple Gen AI services and local models 40:16 - K8sGPT current state and maturity 45:11 - K8sGPT traction 48:40 - K8sGPT acceptance into the sandbox and adopter companies 54:11 - how to reach out to Thomas Schuetz 56:09 - who’s behind K8sGPT 59:07 - where to follow K8sGPT 1:00:17 - Outro Resources: https://github.com/k8sgpt-ai/k8sgpt https://k8sgpt.ai/ Cloud Native Artificial Intelligence whitepaper TAG App Delivery update at KubeCon Paris Fluent Bit v3.0 release OpenFeature Web SDK v1 k8sgpt slack Socials: Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠ Dotan Horovits ============ Twitter: https://twitter.com/horovits LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/ Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@horovits Thomas Schuetz =============== Twitter: https://twitter.com/thschue LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/thschue Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@thschue