SLO Many Talks About Reliability at KubeCon: Here Are Our Picks

The Ultimate Guide to SLOs at KubeCon Europe 

If you’re into SLOs and you’re going to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe August 17 through 20, this is the guide for you. We scoured the agenda for talks that we’re excited about, and we’ve picked out the ones we think will be most interesting and valuable.

Don’t forget to stop by the Nobl9 booth in Startup Hall B…B as in BOOLEAN!

Stayin’ Alive: PodDisruptionBudgets for Maintenance and Upgrades 
Monday August 17, 13:26 – 13:31 CEST

Summary: This Lightning Talk features PDBs, or PodDisruptionBudgets, which allow application owners to define the minimum requirement for a service to operate in a stable manner.

Comment: Sounds like error budgets for Pods, count me in!

Predictable Performance Through Prometheus and Topology Aware Scheduling 
Thursday, August 20, 14:30 – 15:05 CEST

Summary: The focus of this talk is Topology Aware Scheduling, and how using Prometheus to track NUMA topology related metrics enhances the default scheduler, ultimately leading to more effective cluster wide performance of workloads.

Comment: Predictable services mean users are happier. This is important with SLOs.

Migrating Transactions Worth Billions of $ to Service Mesh With No Downtime
Tuesday, August 18, 13:00 – 13:35 CEST

Summary: This talk is a case study of why Gopay chose to move to service mesh, how it was accomplished with zero downtime, and the criticality of monitoring service mesh health.

Comment: Talk about business impact! 

Progressive Delivery in Kubernetes
Tuesday, August 18, 14:30 – 15:05 CEST

Summary: This demo will show how to create a fully automated Progressive Delivery pipeline with Canary deployments and rollbacks in Kubernetes using Jenkins X and Flagger.

Comment: If you want to manage risks in your service, consider progressive delivery. Use SLOs to decide if you should progress to the next stage.

Introduction to Autoscaling
Tuesday, August 18, 13:45 – 14:20 CEST

Summary: During this talk, members of SIG-Autoscaling will explain why you should be autoscaling both applications and clusters, and what tools Kubernetes provides to do that. 

Comment: Scale on demand!

OpenTelemetry Agent and Collector: Telemetry Built-in Into All Software
Thursday, August 20, 18:05 – 18:40 CEST

Summary: Through a demo of automatic java application instrumentation and collector configuration, learn how easy it is to enable telemetry data collection and observability scenarios, as well as how to upload high-quality telemetry to the backend of your choice.

Comment: If you want to SLO, first you need telemetry.

Prometheus Deep Dive
Wednesday, August 19, 13:45 – 14:20 CEST

Summary: The Prometheus deep-dive will feature a Q&A and present advanced use cases, like how to run and scale up a vanilla Prometheus setup for large organizations. 

Comment: Go deep on prometheus so you can tune your service KPIs and SLOs.

Observability at Scale: Running OpenTelemetry Across an Enterprise
Tuesday, August 18, 18:30 – 19:05 CEST

Summary: This talk will cover Intuit’s experience deploying tracing infrastructure using Kubernetes, Jaeger, and OpenTelemetry.

Comment: The bigger the organization, the harder it is to measure.

Hubble – eBPF Based Observability for Kubernetes
Wednesday, August 19, 13:45 – 14:20 CEST

Summary: In this talk, you will get an introduction into Hubble, a new open-source observability platform that aims to assist you in understanding what is going on in all layers of your Kubernetes network. 

Comment: Observing Kubernetes using eBPF sounds like a good approach.

Turn It Up to a Million: Ingesting Millions of Metrics with Thanos Receive
Wednesday, August 19, 13:00 – 13:35 CEST

Summary: This talk presents a solution for creating a multi-tenant horizontally scalable metrics ingestion system using the Thanos Receive component, as well as a demonstration of how to run an automatically scalable hash ring by leveraging the Thanos Receive Controller, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, and the Prometheus Adapter. 

Comment: Moar metrics!

OpenTelemetry Auto-Instrumentation Deep Dive
Thursday, August 20, 18:05 – 18:40 CEST

Summary: In this deep dive, you will learn about the architecture of auto-instrumentation libraries, out-of-the-box OSS libraries integrations, how to configure them to export telemetry data to different tracing and metrics backends, and the possibility to share OSS integrations between auto and manual instrumentation.

Comment: Automatic instrumentation means consistent metrics across services.

Zero Downtime Deployments: Controlling Application Rollouts and Rollbacks
Thursday, August 20, 18:05 – 18:40 CEST

Summary: This talk will discuss Kubernetes automation controllers and other controller types through a series of demonstrations that will reveal their features, benefits, and drawbacks.

Comment: Rolling out new code and managing risks. Sounds like SLOs.

Image Credit: Frank Eiffert on Unsplash