talk: Best Practices and Pitfalls of Instrumenting Your Cloud-Native Application

Observability is crucial for understanding how your application operates in real-time. Among various observability signals—such as logs, traces, and continuous profiling—metrics play a significant role. They provide sampled measurements throughout the system, essential for ensuring service quality, improving performance, scalability, debuggability, security, and enabling real-time, actionable alerting. Building observable applications begins with proper instrumentation. While the Prometheus ecosystem offers tools that simplify this process, there are still numerous opportunities for mistakes or misuse. ...

November 8, 2022 · 1 min · 173 words

talk: Story of Correlation - Integrating Thanos Metrics with Observability Signals

The CNCF Incubated Thanos project with the large open-source community continues to push boundaries regarding observability and monitoring using Prometheus-based metrics. Together with the Prometheus community, it improves the metric story for Kubernetes clusters and beyond. Things like improved performance, better scalability, debuggability, security, metrics backfilling and query QoS is only the tip of the iceberg. As we know, observability nowadays comes in many flavours. Bunching them together is not a trivial side, given many shapes and collection points. Aside from metrics, we have logs, traces or even continuous profiling. In this talk, Kemal and Bartek, Thanos maintainers, after a quick overview of Thanos, will explain how Thanos can be integrated with those non-metric observability signals. The audience will learn an example, end-to-end ways to correlate multiple observability backends with Thanos for enhanced observability and monitoring experience. ...

June 15, 2022 · 1 min · 153 words

talk: eBPF? Safety First!

eBPF being a promising technology is no news. And C is the defacto choice for writing eBPF programs. The act of writing C programs in an error-prone process. Even the eBPF verifier makes life a lot easier; it is still possible to write unsafe programs and make trivial mistakes that elude the compiler but are detected by the verifier in the load time, which are preventable with compile-time checks. It is where Rust comes in. Rust is a language designed for safety. Recently the Rust compiler gained the ability to compile to the eBPF virtual machine, and Rust became an official language for Linux. We discover more and more use cases where eBPF can be helpful. We find more efficient ways to build safe eBPF programs that are parallel to these developments. We will demonstrate how we made applications combined with Rust in the data plane for more safety and Go in the control plane for a higher development pace to target Kubernetes for security, observability and performance tuning. ...

May 10, 2022 · 1 min · 181 words

talk: Building a Go Profiler Using Go

Profiling has long been part of the Go developer’s toolbox to analyze the resource usage of a running process. But do you ever wonder how profilers built? In this talk, I will bring eBPF (a promising Kernel technology) and Go together to build a profiler for understanding Go code at runtime. Profiling has long been part of the developer’s toolbox to analyze the resource usage of a running process. Go users are very familiar with the concept thanks to state-of-art Go tooling. For years Google has consistently been able to cut down multiple percentage points in their fleet-wide resource usage every quarter, using techniques described in their “Google-Wide Profiling” paper, which is called continuous profiling. Through continuous profiling, the systematic collection of profiles, entirely new workflows suddenly become possible. ...

March 20, 2022 · 2 min · 306 words

talk: Parca - Profiling in the Cloud-Native Era

For years Google has consistently been able to cut down multiple percentage points in their fleet-wide resource usage every quarter, using techniques described in their “Google-Wide Profiling” paper. Ad-hoc profiling has long been part of the developer’s toolbox to analyze CPU and memory usage of a running process, however, through continuous profiling, the systematic collection of profiles, entirely new workflows suddenly become possible. Matthias and Kemal will start this talk with an introduction to profiling with Go and demonstrate via Conprof - an open-source continuous profiling project - how continuous profiling allows for an unprecedented fleet-wide understanding of code at runtime. Attendees will learn how to continuously profile Go code to help guide building robust, reliable, and performant software and reduce cloud spend systematically. ...

September 25, 2021 · 1 min · 138 words