Here’s what went down at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Over the span of four days, there were over 200 sessions. From keynotes on Kubernetes, to deep dives into ingesting metrics, the week was jam-packed with insights from technologists and adopters in cloud native and open source.

Now that KubeCon EU is over, let’s do a retro and talk about what went down.

Before this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2023, Chronosphere joined in on the Cloud Native Rejekts event, which took place the Sunday and Monday before the show.

This was an intimate, two-day event that had two talks from our Chronosphere team:

To build or not to build?

On Sunday, our Member of Technical Staff, Mary Fesenko, touched on the evolution of deployment tooling at Chronosphere — from the decision process, to why and how we built our own deployment system.

Observability for you and me

The following day, I presented a talk aimed at helping curious engineers take their first steps in interacting with an active open-source project. Given the focus of what we do at Chronosphere, I discussed the openTelemetry community, its Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and repositories, in addition to the basics “how to open source.” The idea was to take attendees on their first steps towards contributing to an active open-source project that offers a buffet of languages, challenges, and opportunities for getting started with telemetry data. Along the way, we discussed the importance of open standards, distributed tracing, and more. At the end of the talk, I touched on the nuts and bolts of OpenTelemetry alongside the OpenTelemetry operator (as an implementation of a Kubernetes operator).

Tuesday kicked off the main KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference and a slew of co-located off-site events. Firstly, I dropped in on Observability Day Europe.

It was set up to foster collaboration, discussion, and knowledge-sharing of cloud native observability projects (including but not necessarily limited to Prometheus, Fluentd, Fluentbit, OpenTelemetry, and OpenMetrics), as well as vendor-neutral best practices for addressing observability challenges.

This event was intended both for audiences that are new to observability, as well as for seasoned practitioners. Observability Day enabled you to spend a day peeking under the hood of major Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) observability-related projects while broadening your knowledge of the topic.

Meanwhile, the main conference began with a welcome and overview, which transitioned to updates for a series of observability-related CNCF projects, including Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Fluentbit. Below are some notes that I took about the announcements.

Prometheus updates

The Prometheus project team shared updates with us on some of the newly released features available in recent Prometheus releases:

• Support out-of-order sample ingestion
• Native histograms (still experimental, but Björn Rabenstein presented some impressive production use cases)
• Massive memory usage improvements (less!)

Most of these were covered in-depth during KubeCon sessions later in the week.

OpenTelemetry

The project team shared updates on the work they’ve been releasing with the OpenTelemetry project:

• Metrics API/SDK improvement + histogram support
• Logs -> Log Bridge
• Finalized the communication protocol (OTLP) declaring it stable
• Announcing merging with Elastic converging on ECS standards

This project also has several sessions this week at KubeCon diving deeper on some of these topics.

FluentBit

Eduardo Silva updated us on the newest release version 2.1, with all of the following goodness:

• Hot reload support
• Convert from logs to metrics
• Linux, Windows (arm64) host metrics
• Podman container metrics
• Metadata support for logs
• Processors (sort of pipeline)

He closed out by mentioning that they have over 6.3 billion downloads!

Wednesday was the first day of keynotes. We enjoyed opening remarks from the Executive Director and CTO of the CNCF, Priyanka Sharma and Chris Aniszczyk. They were followed with a few keynotes, several of which mentioned sustainability in computing and cloud.

And on the main stage, CNCF announced their Spring Ambassadors – which included myself and Paige!

Lightning talks at Google Cloud’s booth

Later that day, we brought Chronosphere over to our partner, Google Cloud’s booth, to join their series of lightning talks.

With eleven partners involved, ten passport program partners, and six partner lightning talks, you could say it was a busy afternoon.

My lightning talk at their booth covered how teams can better optimize observability spend by making decisions about what to collect, what to drop, and what to aggregate… while still being able to cover the basics like alerting, triage, etc., on a daily basis.

Fun and games at KubeCrawl + CloudNativeFest

Each night of the show, folks had the opportunity to jet off to dinners, events, and gatherings. Wednesday night there was the very first integrated welcome reception and booth crawl party yet—KubeCrawl + CloudNativeFest! Attendees enjoyed local food favorites, old Dutch games, trivia, and even a ball pit.

On Thursday morning, attendees had the chance to join a breakfast hangout hosted by Tyk’s product manager (PM) and head of R&D. Site reliability engineers (SRE), platform engineers, and PMs got a chance to sit down and chat about common issues encountered when running APIs in production.

The rest of the morning was full of exciting keynotes. Kicking it off was a keynote on Kubernetes project updates, followed by a sponsored keynote by AWS.

All the while, the Chronosphere booth was humming, full of attendees getting product demos and having chit-chats with our colleagues.

The last day of the event was still beaming with energy and insights as we wrapped up this year’s event!

In the morning, we listened to opening remarks, followed by a few keynotes around application recovery, the promise of Kubernetes, and the future of cloud native.

I sat down with Alan Shimel, CEO and founder of TechStrong Group, to chat about how my open-source path led me to joining Chronosphere as the Director of Technical Marketing & Evangelism. You can check out the full live-stream from the day here, and my chat starting at minute 38:38.

Alan and I had the chance to dive into how Chronosphere helps modern companies gain control over their data: Unplugging from open standard, and plugging into a managed platform, while having the ability to see live ingestion and data coming in—allows companies to make future-proof business decisions.