Cloud Native and Kubernetes Observability Panel: The State of Union - Bartek Plotka, Red Hat; Liz Fong

The panelists discuss the challenges and future of observability in the industry, emphasizing the need for education and cultural change, as well as standardization of definitions and methodologies.

• Observability is still growing and there is a need for more education in the market
• Cultural change is necessary to expand the use of observability beyond logs, metrics, and traces
• There is a need for standardization of definitions and methodologies to avoid confusion in the market
• Shortening release cycles is important for good observability
• The proliferation of big data and different collection pipelines requires innovation and work
• Observability needs to extend beyond the cloud bubble to include small clusters and devices
• There is a need for similar methodologies that work for a variety of different cases

The panelists discussed the challenges of getting good observability and emphasized the importance of shortening release cycles. Liz pointed out that it's really challenging to get good observability if it's taking months for new software to be released. She advised focusing on shortening release cycles first before focusing on observability. This is a journey that requires going from doing ops-based reactionary actions to getting to business-based actions that can actually understand the impact of features that are released on the bottom line.

With microservices and Cloud-Native solutions adoption increasing, Observability is receiving heightened interest in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) since it enables to chase down the “unknown unknowns,” do Root Cause Analysis and fix issues. InfoQ recently did a virtual panel with experts (URL: https://www.infoq.com/articles/cloud-native-observability/ ) to address fundamental concepts of Observability, including Cloud-Native Observability, some of the misconceptions, technical challenges and industry standards like OpenTelemetry that make it possible to incorporate vendor neutral solutions. Attend this panel to learn about Observability and how to incorporate the different signals from the ground up in a coordinated manner. After attending this panel, attendees will gain a holistic picture of Observability, understand the cultural and technical challenges and how to overcome them.