eBPF? Safety First!

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 · Kemal Akkoyun
Building a Go Profiler Using Go

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 · 307 words · Kemal Akkoyun
Achieving Zero-Instrumentation Monitoring with eBPF

talk: Achieving Zero-Instrumentation Monitoring with eBPF

Metrics are powerful tools in the cloud-native space, enabled by Prometheus. However, using facilities to enable monitoring requires instrumenting the code. Everyone wants observability, but nobody wants to go the extra mile to instrument their clusters or applications. This is where eBPF comes in. eBPF, a promising technology for observability tooling, is not news. To observe the infrastructure and applications, eBPF-based system-wide agents can help us to capture events without requiring recompilation or redeployment of applications. In this talk, attendees will discover alternative ways to collect metrics from applications and infrastructure using system-wide eBPF agents. The presenters will demonstrate what level of observability could be accomplished without instrumentation. ...

February 15, 2022 · 1 min · 121 words · Kemal Akkoyun
Parca - Profiling in the Cloud-Native Era

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 · Kemal Akkoyun
Profiling Go Applications in the Cloud-Native Era

talk: Profiling Go Applications 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 the CPU and memory usage of a running process. However, through continuous profiling, and the systematic collection of profiles, entirely new workflows suddenly become possible. The presenter will start this talk with an introduction to profiling applications, and demonstrate how one can practice it using open-source continuous profiling tools, and how continuous profiling allows for an unprecedented fleet-wide understanding of code at production runtime. ...

April 20, 2021 · 1 min · 141 words · Kemal Akkoyun