Key takeaways: The FinOps Foundation unveiled version 1.0 of its FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, known as FOCUS. AWS joined the steering committee of FOCUS, joining Google and Microsoft. The FinOps Foundation, under The Linux Foundation, continues promoting open best practices, education, and standards around FinOps, including the recent second edition…

If you missed KubeCon North America 2023 in Chicago, or you were there and spent more time in the “hallway tracks,” you may have missed some of the big news that came out of the show. I covered the big happenings in the open source cloud native and observability realm…

Technology juggernauts–despite their larger staffs and budgets–still face the “cognitive load” for DevOps that many organizations deal with day-to-day. That’s what led Spotify to build Backstage, which supports DevOps and platform engineering practices for the creation of developer portals. Eventually, Spotify made the decision to open source Backstage and donate…

It’s time to talk about the unspoken challenges of monitoring Kubernetes: the bloat of metric data, the high churn rate of pod metrics, configuration complexity, and so much more. — This article was originally published at The New Stack. It’s astonishing how much data is emitted by Kubernetes out of the box. A simple three-node Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus will ship around 40,000 active series by default! Do we really need all that data?

Terraform, a powerful Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tool, has long been the backbone of choice for DevOps professionals and developers seeking to manage their cloud infrastructure efficiently. However, recent shifts in its licensing have sent ripples of concern throughout the tech community. HashiCorp, the company behind Terraform, made a pivotal…

Lessons learned from the relicensing of Terraform, Elasticsearch, Redis and more — Terrified of Terraform relicensing? It’s not the worst that could happen. Just imagine your beloved open source database, which lies at the heart of your system, being relicensed one day. This happened in the few years with MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis and other vendor-owned open source. Yes, an open source project…

One of the most captivating discussions I had at KubeCon Europe 2023 in Amsterdam was about standardization of a query language for observability. This query language standard aims to provide a unified way of querying observability data across logs, metrics, traces, and other relevant signals. The conversation shed light on…

Prometheus has been for a long time the go-to way for monitoring Kubernetes and cloud-native systems. Prometheus provides a full stack, including the metric scraping as well as the backend, including a time-series database for storing the metrics, a UI, AlertManager and more. Then came OpenTelemetry, which offers a unified…

TL;DR Key updates: Query Language Standard for Observability: new CNCF working group led by eBay, Netflix Standardizing the Prometheus Remote-Write Protocol Sunsetting OpenCensus in Favor of OpenTelemetry Elastic Common Schema merge with OpenTelemetry Logs Specification OpenTelemetry Logs Bridge Specification merged, progress to stabilize Logs API/SDK OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) reaches 1.0 Today’s IT systems…