This time I sat down with Karim Traiaia, the Co-founder of Kerno, a company that helps troubleshoot cloud applications. Here are some of the topics we discussed:

* The sparkEvery startup starts with a pain point—how did Karim come up with Kerno, and what problem was he trying to solve at the beginning?

* First customersLanding those early paying users is always tough. Did Kerno rely on free trials, community outreach, or partnerships to get started?

* The eBPF foundationWas eBPF part of the plan from day one, or did the idea for Kerno evolve into it over time? And why eBPF specifically over other tooling?

* What only eBPF can doWhere has eBPF been able to collect critical data that simply wasn’t available from user space or other observability tools?

* Taming the telemetry floodObservability tools generate a LOT of events—from syscalls to protocol traces. How does Kerno decide what data to keep vs. what’s just noise, and how much is actually useful in practice?

* The observer effectWhat about CPU and memory overhead—how does Kerno make sure the eBPF agent itself doesn’t impact the workloads?

* Scaling upWhat’s the largest production environment Kerno has been tested in? What bottlenecks emerged at scale, and how were they solved?

* Measuring impactKerno promises a “64% reduction in customer-facing production incidents” and a “3x increase in successful deployment attempts.” How are those numbers measured and validated?

* Looking aheadWhat would Karim consider a home-run feature or capability for Kerno three years from now?

* From visibility to autonomyWill we see a future where observability shifts from passive runtime visibility to autonomous systems that detect and act on issues—powered by eBPF-fed AI models?

* Startup mindsetIf Karim were a fresh graduate looking at the industry, how would he approach finding and validating an idea that could grow into a startup?

🐝 I’ll leave it there—hope you enjoy the conversation.

Get full access to eBPFChirp at ebpfchirp.substack.com/subscribe