Austin Parker, Lightstep | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone. We're here.

We're live in in Amsterdam at kubecon where we understand their 10,000 people and it seems like every one of them is on that show floor here today. It's it's buzzing. Um, really unique thing about the show floor here at the ray the Rai, Center is we have like, I don't know Austin, what would you call it's not if you airplane Hangar, it's like a giant airplane Hangar and every other panel is wide open and we are we're a place right now where we need sunscreen even it's that Sons.

The future Brown Gotta Wear Shades that that's it right there. So poor Austin suggested wearing Shades. Look, I'm from Florida.

We always have glasses with us. So we're here. It's not that we think we're too cool for school.

But anyway, let me introduce you to Austin Parker from light staff. Hey, Austin, how are you doing? Great.

Good to have you here. For those who've watched text junk TV or some of our webinars lightstep and Austin is no stranger, but for many of you tuning in live for our coverage here at kubecon, you may not know awesome. You may not know lightstep.

What's the why don't we start with a little bit about Austin and then go into the light steps? Yeah. So I'm Austin Parker.

I am the head of developer relations at light step a service now company. We've been part of the service now family for a couple years now and lights up itself is a Mobility platform for kind of the modern Cloud native Enterprise. We bring together your metrics and logs and traces and all that data together help you understand system performance and understand how your customers are doing, you know, yeah.

And in my spare time, I'm also maintainer for the OpenTelemetry project, which you may be familiar with if you are familiar with like the cloudnative observability space very familiar that that's actually what I'm here to talk about today. So, you know, Someone told me the other another recent interview that I did that opened Telemetry is now the second biggest open source project in cncf that's correct. That's correct.

It's actually if you look at all open source projects on GitHub. It's in the top 30, right that's even including things like Linux, you know little projects that you maybe never heard of what yes small ones, but it's remarkable at how much excitement there is how many people are involved in the open public community and the observability community and it's because it's an idea who's time has come and you know at life's up that's what we've been hearing as well from our customers. They don't want to be in the world where they're paying, you know someone to come in and lock up all their observability data, right?

They want it to be open source. They want to have control of it. And that leads you know, what we're announcing this week actually at cubecon is that lightstep is now the first as far as I'm or the first vendor the first observability platform to support end in open Telemetry with no custom plugins.

No proprietary agents. No proprietary code you can run a hundred percent OpenTelemetry on your side of the firewall will accept open something format data. The data is yours to control.

You don't have to install anything other than like one line it can fig to tell you you are right and that's we're doing this because that's what our customers ask for. Right like and we're hearing this from everyone in the industry. Not just cool hip startups not just kind of hip Enterprise companies, you know, but big Banks right big Enterprise they're coming and saying we believe in open source.

We believe in OpenTelemetry. This is foundational to the where we're going. We need to control our data, right and absolutely very important.

Well, You know, you can't make wine before it's time Austin, right? And I think one of the things you know first we had this the whole this whole thing about big data, right and big data was General Revolution, I think and I'm talking about Hadoop back then. Yeah, right and then the so the problem was back then was my goodness.

We got how do we collect all this data? Then you know it's like the rat moving through the snake. All right, we could collect all this data.

How do we store all this data then? How do we analyze all this data? And now how do we make actionable intelligence out of all this data right and along the way you get things like again lnai acting in there you get, you know, better storage better, you know faster.

Here we couldn't have the open Telemetry we have today until those other kind of blocks were laid Yeah foundations. Yeah, but we're at a point now where you get an inflection point. And you you know, the it takes all takes off.

Yeah, and I think that's really what we're seeing right now around OpenTelemetry around observability. It's real absolutely and I've said this before but OpenTelemetry and I think that if you look at the story of the project, we're we're at the end of the beginning right good way of putting it we're at the end of act one and and things are going to start changing very soon. The project has gone through the tremendous amount of growth and we are really pushing very hard to get kind of our core signal stable.

Right so metrics logs and tracing and I'm not here to talk about when we're gonna release things. It's an open source project after all things are kind of down when they're done, but we're pushing very hard towards saying like Okay, we really want to have this stuff done and stable OpenTelemetry this weekend announce that that we're actually converging the elastic common schema for logging. Yeah with the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions.

I actually interviewed someone from elastic on this perfect. Yeah. So and again, this is the goal the project we want to consolidate we want to converge.

I want there to be fewer standards. We want there to be one well supported standard for everyone and if we can achieve that and that's certainly direction that we're going right. We're rapidly moving towards that once we kind of hit that point.

You're gonna see a real big change in. how people are kind of approaching monitoring and observability because historically you do get locked into you know, whatever your provider is because they're the ones that has the instrumentation for you. We believe that by a coupling the instrumentation from the observability right saying the instrumentation is yours.

The data is yours. Then that really makes it more of a question of like, okay. Well, how am I as a analysis tool as an ability platform?

How do I make it easy for you to analyze that data understand that data and connect that data to sort of customer insights business analytics other things like that. That's one of those real core strengths. I think of lights that from service now is that we're able to work with, you know, honestly this amazing company that has some of the more world's largest companies helping them do business process automation helping them understand their you know it and customer experience.

And we can blend all of this right like that's where we believe that the future is with kind of observility. It's not just hey, my API is slow or hey, I've got some errors over here. It's how I actually connecting this to customer experience and custom, you know, and those kind of like Revenue outcomes good to speak.

Absolutely. Hey, you mentioned something awesome when we were sitting down. Yeah like that put some Code.

Oh right in OpenTelemetry. So no, thank you for reminding me. you know part of this, you know, what we're seeing around people wanting to control their data people wanting to control their open deployments is that we can't put people in a situation where they're where you know, they support OpenTelemetry, but it's like it's OpenTelemetry with a star next to it.

You know, it's the the Sammy Sosa of That's a little after yeah, you don't want that asterisk. Right and we're committing to take all of our OpenTelemetry enhancements and Upstream them to the project. So if you're not, you know to explain that you can think of open telemetries, you know, this open source project and a lot of people in this space are building on top of it.

Right but maybe they have a proprietary extension or something that you know, you have to a little extra something you got to add in there to make it work with that specific product. But we're committing to do is take all the enhancements and actually push them from lights that into OpenTelemetry. So we're donating all of this engineering time and effort.

There's a couple of examples of this we've been working with our friends at F5 to support. I'm increased compression for open clumpy data to make it cheaper for companies to send that data out. We've been working with Amazon and several other companies on improving the story for like Lambda and functions as a service observability.

We're working with honeycomb and other companies on improving the configuration instead of experience. Right and I think that's the strength of this project because you can get people that are competitors working across the aisle to make a better project for everyone and that's why I'm so excited about the future of OpenTelemetry and what I really hope is that you see more companies doing making these sort of pledges as well, you know. Just described doesn't apply just OpenTelemetry.

It's this whole opens. It's what I call the foundational error of Open Source. Yeah, and I've been in open source, 25 28 years 30 years, even you know, originally it was kind of that Cathedral and the bizarre.

Remember I read that book. Yeah, you know, it's kind of wild west And then from there we went to a big brother era where a light step would be the you know, the manager if you will the owner of an OpenTelemetry and they would run it for their for their benefit. Yeah, it benefited the community, but it was really their benefit and it was very hard for other vendors.

To to contribute to be partners because they weren't unequal footing right? Yeah. I think they call that open core these days.

Well, it's still that big there still is yeah open source projects that are managed by one vendor. Yes, absolutely. But then we did this kind of foundational area where you have the Linux foundation and you know cncf part of it even the eclipse Foundation the Apache Foundation where You have this co-opetition if we could call it that right?

Well, I like that but you have vendors who compete in the market, but we all play on an even playing field because we know the better we make that foundational playing field the higher we can all soar in our own like you just mentioned there were once you're doing this and the honeycomb folks do that. Yeah, right and that's what that's what today's Market's about. Well, if you think about it, you know to be a little busy for a second What's the total addressable Market of observability?

If not every single company that runs software and there are no companies that don't run software, right? You don't have an Enterprise business in 2023 without a lot of software you all you don't have I mean You're not living in the woods, right? Even if you are living the woods, you probably still need an app to get there.

Yep, and Where to get your stuff delivered to you exactly right like you're still getting Amazon. But that that's really I think the key thing right is like as an industry, especially a class, you know in the cloud native Seer or a vendor in the cloud industry, I should say. Look at the accomplishments of kubernetes.

I mean, look at look around us right like that thousand people and crazy people that are running that are working on projects that primarily don't have a single origin. You know, I know kubernetes like there's the people think kubernetes like, oh, it's a cool thing but who's the biggest contributor to kubernetes right? It's like right ahead.

Yeah. It's it's these big companies. Yeah, very big companies that aren't named Google.

We achieve more as an industry when we work together. And I think that the you know kubecon is a great example of this open flumtree is a great example of this because we're not just building, you know. Things, you know cool Technologies.

We're not just making like really neat demos. We're building the platforms that are really going to power the next 30 to 50 years of software. I agree and to do that and to make that a resilient and reliable and a sustainable way of building these platforms.

We have to do it together because we've learned from the past and we've seen like what happens when you don't do that walk initiation, right Linux Unix all of that. Hey awesome. We're almost at a time, but there's another subject.

I kind of want to touch on. And that is you mentioned light step is a service now company. Yes, it's been so for about two years, of course for those who are not familiar with light step that four Amazing co-founders Ben siegelman and Do you remember the onions Foods right?

Service now required the company emerged not two years ago. It's taking some time. But you know the day they come together and look there is some people say wow.

It's now part of this big company, but service now is a great company to work with they're very open source friendly. They get the market talk to us about light step and service now working together and what our audience out here can expect So I you know. I want to as a shout out servicenows annual user conferences coming up in a few weeks it is we'll be there.

You'll be there. All right. Maybe I'll see you around.

Yep, and I will have some real exciting announcements to make and knowledge this year, but You know in a general sense what's service now sees is the value, you know. If I had to like describe being what is the point of service now? What is actually trying to do?

You know, they really are trying to make work work better for people they're trying to make this idea of enterprise software something that is achievable manageable for all of their customers because what I have learned from talking to a lot of service on customers and kind of seeing how they're implemented is that the kind of problems that their customers are facing are very novel. Right? Like they they are people that kind of sell into that traditional, you know it Center and this traditional it operator operations centers, but those you know, it managers of cios.

They're confronted with this real reality of hey as I go through this Cloud transformation, and we're all going through this Cloud transformation. Suddenly, I have all this new stuff and I don't you know, it. It doesn't fit into this model that I have of how to actually like understand and quantify performance or measure things and where lightstep can really shut, you know is really bringing a lot of value to the table is we're giving them a bridge between, you know, Cloud native kubernetes applications and sort of their traditional it operations management their Incident Management their change management, and we can provide that bridge between old and new that helps.

them really understand what's going on the it estate be able to you know, still effectively respond to incidents be able to give you know, sort of their front line it or customer support people the data that they need to be able to communicate reliability to their customers and honestly so many many more things right like we're if we're at the end of the beginning of OpenTelemetry, we're we're still kind of at the beginning of the beginning of lights that plus service now and we have some really exciting announcements, you know later on this year that I'm sure you'll learn about in a month or two. Yeah, and it's it's really You know, we are just getting started and I'm super excited about what's next. So my man Austin, it's a pleasure to see you here in person.

Great to see you again. I love doing this with the shades. I feel like a great doing this.

Yeah. No, I feel like we need a little umbrella. That's all.

Do it. No, it's actually so importantly cold outside. Yeah it I'm from Florida.

It's freezing. Yeah, I'm yeah. Hey, we're gonna take a break.

We're live here at kubecon in Amsterdam. We'll be back in a moment with our next guest.