With over 1,000 companies using it and 21.5K+ stars on GitHub, the Backstage open source project is quickly becoming a go-to tool for managing developer infrastructure. In this episode, I’ll sit down with Lee Mills, a Senior Engineering Manager from Spotify's Backstage project, to learn more about how the open source platform is revolutionizing the developer experience and how it aligns with the growing Internal Developer Platform (IDP) space. We’ll discuss the need that drove Spotify to build this internal tool, about the decision and journey to open source it and donate it to the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). We’ll also discuss the new commercial plugins, what’s coming up on the roadmap, and much more. 

Lee has worked as an engineering manager for the past 12 years, from Amazon to Spotify and everything in between. Prior to that Lee had a mixed background working in academia as a lecturer, worked as a Boom Op for television in the UK and lived in more places than he can count.

The episode was live-streamed on 17 May 2023 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/W3c4YJ71BOQ

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.https://www.twitch.tv/openobservabilityhttps://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks  

Show Notes:

01:44 Spotify Engineering internal need for Backstage

07:09 Backstage and Platform Engineering

10:33 Backstage components: Templates, Catalogue and Plugins

15:31 Why Spotify open-sourced Backstage

21:45 from Spotify’s internal Hack Week to a viral growth

25:19 a perfect community contributed feature in 24 hours

28:48 new Backstages use cases for Banking and healthcare

30:54 Spotify released commercial plugins for Backstage

36:51 How to follow Backstage discussion and Lee Mills

39:08 KubeCon Europe updates

40:51 Prometheus remote-write is standardized

41:32 Sunsetting OpenCensus

42:31 ECS to merge with OpenTelemetry specification

43:22 progress to stabilize Logs in OpenTelemetry

45:02 MicroProfile v6.0 support OpenTelemetry Traces

45:40 Grafana 9.5 release

Resources:

Backstage website: https://backstage.io 

Kubecon Europe 2023 talk: The State of Backstage in 2023: https://youtu.be/vskefrlvocE 

Kubecon Europe 2023 talk: Lunar building an internal compliance platform using Backstage: https://youtu.be/6T3Mf6pdg7E

Backstage accepted as CNCF incubation project: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2022/03/15/backstage-project-joins-the-cncf-incubator/

Socials:

Dotan Horovits

============

Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

Lee Mills

This is a special episode, live from the KubeCon show floor in Amsterdam. Join us to hear the hot updates from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 as well as insider insights from the CNCF’s head of ecosystem, Taylor Dolezal.

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.

https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability

https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks  

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:

Resources:

Socials:

Dotan Horovits

============

Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/ 

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

Taylor Dolezal

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is the home of the most prominent open source projects used today, such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, ArgoCD, Linkerd and more. These projects fuel today’s cloud native architectures and software release pipelines. With its immense growth, it has become difficult to keep tabs on the hundreds of new and evolving projects and specifications, the different working groups and technical advisory groups, the different community forums and events, and to see where it’s all heading.

I invited Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the CNCF, to join me on this episode, to help us understand the CNCF landscape and evolution. We will also discuss the trends in observability and in the open source realm in general. Chris also has some interesting predictions to share. 

Chris Aniszczyk is an open source executive and engineer with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He's currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation focused on developer relations and running the Open Container Initiative (OCI) / Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Furthermore, he's a partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups.

At Twitter, he created their open source program and led their open source efforts. For many years he served on the Eclipse Foundation's Board of Directors representing the committer community and the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee. In a previous life, he bootstrapped a consulting company, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many eclipse.org and Linux related projects.

The episode was live-streamed on 15 March 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/lMUFGmNploc

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.

https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability

https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks  

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:

Resources:

Socials:

Dotan Horovits

============

Twitter: https://twitter.com/horovits 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/ 

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

Chris Aniszczyk

===============

Twitter: @cra

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caniszczyk/

Mastodon: @[email protected]

Many organizations struggle in understanding and monitoring the costs of their Kubernetes workloads, cloud infrastructure and cloud native applications. Moreover, different cloud providers use different conventions, which makes it difficult to compare across vendors and to monitor cost in multi-cloud environments. The lack of cost observability and vendor-agnostic FinOps standardization can become a critical business challenge.  

OpenCost is a vendor-neutral open source project for measuring and allocating infrastructure and container costs. It’s built for Kubernetes cost monitoring to power real-time cost monitoring, showback, and chargeback, across on-premises Kubernetes as well as cloud managed offering.  

I discussed this topic with Matt Ray, Senior Community Manager for the OpenCost project. Matt  has been active in Open Source and DevOps communities for over two decades and has spoken at and helped organize many conferences and meetups. He is currently the Senior Community Manager at Kubecost for the CNCF Sandbox Project OpenCost. Matt also co-hosts the Software Defined Talk podcast.

The episode was live-streamed on 14 February 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqXQV2jsxo

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:

Resources:

Socials:

Dotan Horovits

============

Twitter: horovits

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

Matt Ray

===============

Twitter: mattray

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mhray/

Mastodon: @[email protected]

A 3-node Kubernetes cluster with Prometheus will ship around 40k active series by default! Do we really need all that data? The current state of Kubernetes open source monitoring is in need of improvement. High churn rate of pod metrics, proliferation of metrics with low usage, and configuration complexity are some of the issues that need to be addressed.

I discussed this topic with Aliaksandr Valialkin, CTO at VictoriaMetrics and creator of the open source project. We discussed the common problems, as well as directions and best practices to overcome some of these complexities as individuals and as a community. We also discussed VictoriaMetrics open source project and how it addresses some of these challenges.

Aliaksandr a Golang engineer, who likes writing simple and performant code and creating easy-to-use programs. Sometimes these hard-to-match requirements work together, like in the VictoriaMetrics case.

The episode was live-streamed on 24 January 2023 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/live/Z-58C8HFGb8

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:

Resources:

Socials:

Dotan Horovits 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/horovits  
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/horovits/  

Aliaksandr Valialkin

Twitter: https://twitter.com/valyala

So much has been going on with the Prometheus project and its ecosystem, that it’s time to have a proper catch up. And there’s no better person to walk us through it than Julien Pivotto, who debriefed the community last month at PromCon.

Julien Pivotto is a maintainer of Prometheus, the open source monitoring and alerting solution. He is the co-founder of the company O11y, that provides premium support for open source observability tools such as Prometheus, Thanos and Grafana.

The episode was live-streamed on 19 December 2022 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vui4EgveUxg

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:

Resources:

Socials:

At Meta (Facebook, Instragram et al) everything is data, and data driven approach is the rule, from product to engineering, from HR to finance. This is also how the team at Meta treats observability. Let’s see how we treat observability as a data analytics problem, and what you can implement, even if you’re not a hyperscaler.

On this episode I’ll host David Ostrovsky from Meta. David is a software developer with over 20 years of industry experience, speaker, trainer, blogger and co-author of “Pro Couchbase Server”. He specializes in large-scale distributed system architecture.

The episode was live-streamed on 7 November 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/1l0HKUDoX4Q

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:

Resources:

Socials:

Everyone’s talking about Platform Engineering these days. Even Gartner featured it in its Hype Cycle for Software Engineering 2022. But what is Platform Engineering really about? Is it the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Is it just a fancy rebrand for DevOps or SRE? And how does observability pertain to platform engineering?

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks Horovits hosted George Hantzaras, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering at Citrix. George is a distributed systems expert and a hands-on engineering leader with focus on delivering B2B cloud services at scale. Coming from a DevOps background, he focuses on implementing SRE at enterprise scale working with cloud native technologies. He has been organizing the Athens Cloud Computing Meetup since 2016 and the Athens Hashicorp User Group. Most recently, he has been a speaker at global events like Hashiconf, DeveloperWeek, Voxxed Days, DevNexus and more, focusing on reliability engineering, agile leadership, scaling engineering teams, and entrepreneurship.

The episode was live-streamed on 6 October 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/zJGMUVY6fDM

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:

Resources:

Socials:

Instrumentation is that black magic that makes our application emit traces, logs, metrics or other telemetry. How does it work? What options are available in different programming languages, such as Java, Python and Go? What does OpenTelemetry offer in this domain?  

On this episode of OpenObservability Talks I hosted Eden Federman, Co-Founder & CTO at keyval, a company focused on making observability simpler. Eden is the creator of two open source projects: Odigos and Go automatic instrumentation (now part of OpenTelemetry). Eden is passionate about everything related to observability and performance monitoring. He also created kubectl-flame, a profiler for Kubernetes.

The episode was live-streamed on 22 September 2022 and the video is available at https://youtu.be/VFykWV1mLAI

OpenObservability Talks episodes are released monthly, on the last Thursday of each month and are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on YouTube.

We live-stream the episodes on Twitch and YouTube Live - tune in to see us live, and chime in with your comments and questions on the live chat.
https://www.twitch.tv/openobservability
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLKOtaBdQAJVRJqhJDuOlPg

Have you got an interesting topic you'd like to share in an episode? Reach out to us and submit your proposal at https://openobservability.io/

Show Notes:

Resources:

Socials:

Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠

YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠

In this episode, hosted by Jonah Kowall we are excited to introduce Pranay Prateek the co-founder and creator of SigNoz to the audience. He is an entrepreneur who has been building an interesting and exciting open-source observability platform. The goal is a unified interface and data storage system which is scalable and manageable much more easily than today’s disjointed open-source tools. SigNoz has a goal of unifying tracing, metrics, and logging in a single platform and interface. We’ll dig into the evolution of this unique project from its creation until today, along with the adoption of the technology and contribution from the community. We will discuss the data architecture and their move from Druid towards ClickHouse, which is always a fascinating topic. Finally, we’ll elaborate on the future of SigNoz and where things are going with the project. Join me, Jonah Kowall, as I speak with Pranay Prateek on this episode of OpenObservability Talks.

The podcast episodes are available for listening on your favorite podcast app and on this YouTube channel.

Socials:

Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/OpenObserv⁠

YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@openobservabilitytalks⁠