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: 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

talk: Building Observable Go Services

In modern days, we run our applications as loosely coupled micro-services on distributed, elastic infrastructure as (mostly) stateless workloads. Under these circumstances, observability has become a key attribute to understand how our applications run and behave in action, in order to provide highly available and resilient service. There exist several observability signals, such as “log”, “metric”, “tracing” and “profiling” that can be collected from a running service, which we can also call pillars of observability. Using these signals, we can create real-time, actionable alerts, create panels where we can monitor applications closely, and perform in-depth analysis to find the root of the systems’ failures. Within the Go and CNCF ecosystem, there are a variety of tools that can collect and make these observable signals useful. ...

December 1, 2020 · 2 min · 228 words

talk: Are you testing your observability?

Observability is the key to understand how your application runs and behaves in action. This is especially vital for distributed environments like Kubernetes, where users run Cloud-Native microservices often written in Go. Among many other observability signals like logs and traces, the metrics signal has a substantial role. Sampled measurements observed throughout the system are crucial for monitoring the health of the applications and, they enable real-time, actionable alerting. While there are many open-source robust libraries, in various languages, that allow us to easily instrument services for backends like Prometheus, there are still numerous possibilities to make a mistake or misuse those libraries. ...

February 15, 2020 · 1 min · 202 words