Grafana Labs at KubeCon: eBPF, sustainability, Prometheus, and more
Grafana Labs is once again headed to KubeCon, and we want to see you there!
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 will run from Tuesday, March 19 to Friday, March 22 at the Paris Expo Porte De Versailles. The conference, which is the CNCF’s flagship event, brings together open source enthusiasts from around the world. Grafana Labs is a proud silver sponsor of this year’s KubeCon Europe event, including Observability Day 2024 on March 19.
If you plan to attend, drop by booth L6 at KubeCon’s sponsor solutions showcase to meet the team and grab some swag. You can also contact us to set up a meeting with one of our experts, and continue reading to find out about the sessions we’re participating in.
Grafanistas as KubeCon: sessions to attend and learn
The following talks feature, or are led by, members of the Grafana Labs team:
Curveballs: Learnings from instrumenting managed runtime applications with eBPF
Tuesday, March 19, 15:50 - 16:15 CET
A lot of eBPF existing documentation focuses on instrumenting the Linux Kernel, or native applications that have standard ELF symbol tables and do their own memory management. But, what about using eBPF to instrument applications that compile to native code, but are managed by a runtime of some kind? For example, can we use eBPF to instrument applications written in Go or Java?
This talk, led by Principal Software Engineer Nikola Grcevski and Senior Software Engineer Mario Macías, discusses approaches to instrumenting applications that have non-standard symbol tables, don’t have static symbol tables, can dynamically recompile parts of their code, have reference moving memory managers (GCs), and can grow/shrink the stack between “uprobe” and “uretprobe.” Nikola and Mario will go through various learnings and failures they had while working on application instrumentation with eBPF, trying to instrument natively compiled applications running with managed runtimes.
Lightning talk: Debunking myths about environmental sustainability in the cloud, building a greener CNCF landscape
Tuesday, March 19, 17:35 - 17:40 CET
Environmental sustainability is an increasingly important topic, in general, and in the cloud native and open source realm. However, with the steadily growing attention to the topic, there are misconceptions and doubts regarding the actual impact of proposed actions that are meant to promote environmental sustainability in the cloud.
Niki Manoledaki, a Grafana Labs Software Engineer and CNCF Environmental Sustainability Lead, and Kristina Devochko, CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability tech lead, will put on their myth-busting hats to address and debunk some of these misconceptions. They will provide an objective, evidence-based understanding of the real implications some actions may have on environmental sustainability in the cloud native context.
Disintegrated telemetry: the pains of monitoring asynchronous workflows
Wednesday, March 20, 16:30 - 17:05 CET
Different components involved in asynchronous workflows typically communicate via messages or events. Instrumenting and observing such workflows often results in disintegrated telemetry pieces (metrics and traces), from which it is hard to deduce the lifetime and impact of a message or event. Distributed tracing offers two different solution approaches to this problem: strong correlation via parent/child relationships, and weak correlation via links.
In this talk, Principal Software Engineer Johannes Tax shows how each solution approach is broken in its own way, and provides insights that help you to choose the least broken solution for your scenario. Finally, to show some light at the end of the tunnel, Johannes will give an overview of standardization efforts in this space, including W3C context propagation drafts for messaging protocols, and the messaging semantic conventions created by the OpenTelemetry messaging workgroup, which he leads.
Rebuilding your cloud native community: lessons learned from Stardew Valley
Thursday, March 21, 17:25 - 18:00 CET
In the wake of COVID-19, many cloud native communities are struggling to regain their former footing. This talk by Senior Developer Advocate Imma Valls draws inspiration from Stardew Valley to provide actionable strategies for reviving and revitalizing your cloud native community meetup.
Just like restoring a farm, revitalizing a community requires careful planning, dedication, and a touch of gamification. Imma will discuss the strategies that were used for a successful comeback of the Barcelona community, such as how to engage older and new organizers, finding captivating topics and events, securing venues and sponsors, attracting speakers, or establishing a regular meetup schedule.
Prometheus update from the maintainers
Thursday, March 21, 17:25 - 18:00 CET
Distinguished Engineer Bryan Boreham and Simon Pasquier, a principal software engineer at Red Hat, will lead this talk on Prometheus, an open source systems monitoring system and CNCF Graduated project. Prometheus benefits from a rich ecosystem including Alertmanager, client libraries for many languages, the Prometheus Operator to install on Kubernetes, and dozens of Exporters to provide the raw data.
Contribfest: hands-on scaling of Prometheus metric collection with Kubernetes Operators
Friday, March 22, 14:00 - 15:30 CET
These days, many cloud providers have adopted PromQL with the Prometheus data model into their SaaS centralized monitoring offerings. Many mature OSS projects also exist, which allow anyone to set up a centralized observability platform. For this reason, the Prometheus agent use case emerged, focusing on robust and efficient configuration, scraping, and forwarding the metrics from inside the clusters to the remote storage of your choice.
This problem-solving session will be led by Senior Software Engineer Jesus Vazquez, as well as Bartłomiej Płotka and Mahmoud Amin from Google, and Arthur Silva Sens from Coralogix.
Deploying with confidence: lessons learned navigating deployments of a 100-strong development team
Friday, March 22, 16:00 - 16:35 CET
Like many developers, the Grafana as a Service team used to dream of deploying to the cloud more often to get features and bug fixes to users faster. However, maintaining release stability amidst major code changes, such as new features or refactors, proved challenging.
Join Senior Software Engineer II Stephanie Hingtgen and Senior Software Engineer Michael Mandrus as they walk through their two year journey of transforming our deployment processes to increase release frequency, without compromising stability, while over 100 engineers actively contributed to the codebase. Learn how they facilitated safer rollouts, helped foster a cloud-first mindset, established robust monitoring for seamless and cost-effective feature rollouts, and learned from their mistakes along the way.
If you have ever been in the trenches of large-scale application development, this is an opportunity to hear about our experiences delivering software to a large Grafana Cloud user base, learn about best practices for rolling out features safely to your users, and gain the confidence to implement stable daily deployments yourself.
Looking for more ways to connect with Grafana Labs? Check out our events page to see upcoming in-person and virtual opportunities.
