Austin Parker, Lightstep | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2022

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone. We're back here live in Detroit for kubecon day two of our show floor coverage.

Hope you're enjoying it. This next guest here is you might have seen him on some of our video shows video series is going to talk about that in a second, but we're and by the way, we will be doing a video show here in about an hour and a hour and 20 minutes or so, but let me introduce you to Austin Parker Austin welcome. Hey, thanks for having me might be pleasure.

So Austin, I'm gonna kind of let you tell your story where you're working how you got here. Yeah, and all of that so long story short. I for a long time I was a developer.

I worked as a devops engineer. I was responsible for making sure we had all these really complex integration testing environments and deployments for releases had to go out and I kept getting woken up at 3:00 in the morning or four in the morning because something failed and the first thing I had to do was go figure out what was wrong, right? And so I spent hours in Powershell.

Thank you. It's been hours and power shell and grep going through logs and servers trying to correlate things and I really hated it because it's that's a bad way to spend an evening right or in early morning or an early morning or when you're trying to do anything else. The last thing you want to do is be trying to figure out why the computer broke right?

So I joined lights up about four years ago in light steps goal is to Really build unified observability for application developers and SRE teams and devops Engineers so that people don't have to spend hours at night repping through logs or trying to figure out like why is the server broken right? Why is my kubernetes cluster not working correctly? Why are my applications not deploying but also to answer really important sort of reliability and sustaining engineering questions because it's really easy to get caught up and thing like, oh, we only care about that harsh Edge right when the things are crashing, but you look around here, right?

Look at how many businesses there are they're all vying for the same people and what makes the difference between, you know, your business and another business. It's like end user experience. So if you're trying to build a better application and you're trying to you know understand how people are understand what the performance of your application is, like for users.

Then you also need that sort of observability data and the ability to kind of see and understand your system and model it and ask questions like Where are you know where our transactions slow but group of users. Are they slow for? What's the performance on like a mobile device versus the desktop versus whatever but then also subdivide by the type of mobile device, you know, and where are we losing people all this and taking all that data putting it together and getting answers to you know, the questions that really matter for you is developers and is businesses.

Absolutely. so look, this is cloud native Con in addition to kubecon. Let's talk about the connections.

Yeah. So today what we're really excited to talk about at kubecon is two things one open Telemetry, which is a cncf project. It's had one of the big one more.

It's at the second biggest behind Prometheus behind kubernetes Okay, so it's bigger than you think the improvements in terms of like activity and sort of active development but a lot of that's because it's, you know a big project and there's a lot of control contributors, right? There's a lot of surface area so you get a lot of contributions. but you know open Telemetry has actually had two big announcements this week.

One of them is that there's an open Telemetry demo. Application. So if people hear about open symmetry, they say I want to get started with it.

We now have a demo for you to go into the second is that open Telemetry metrics are becoming generally available. And that's really important to us in the light step side because we've been a big part of open Telemetry from the jump. We were you know, kind of part of the initial efforts to form that we worked with our great, you know, really great people at Microsoft and Google and other companies to kind of bring this project together and because we're so involved, we really buy into the philosophy of like, hey, you use open Telemetry and you unify all this data together and to that end.

We've announced our unified query language so which is the first Query language for Telemetry that lets you use the same. Language for like querying any type of fluently. So instead of just having like my log search query and that's written one way or my metrics query which is written in promql or my Trace query which is just like clicking some stuff in a UI.

Now you have one language that you can build into your terraform. You can build into your you know operators and you can do all this stuff in code rather than having to click through a UI in order to build your dashboards and build your alerts and things like that. Love it, excellent stuff.

And I wanted to if you don't mind. Yeah. A little guinea pig here with you.

Okay, explain to our audience kind of the You work for commercial entity. It's a large public company. Open Telemetry is this killer?

Open source project part of cncf. How do you how do you wear both hats? How do you balance that the question?

So I think a lot of it is that I got into software. I got into observability to solve a problem. I had right as a person.

and I think it's it can be challenging. I think people in all parts of you know, everyone that's a commercially commercial contributor, right? You know, there is that tension between but it's what is the company want?

And what is the, you know, the end user of the open source stuff want but I think in terms of open Telemetry, it actually really is a Situation where you don't have to make that trade off because what's good for open Telemetry is good for every observability company in this room. Because what we are doing is right now if you think about it from a commercial standpoint, right if you are a large monitoring company and you want to get users you have to spend millions of dollars a year on building custom Integrations with all this different software. Where as open Telemetry kind of puts all that into a standard?

So, you know the money makes sense because if everyone will disagree, oh, we're going to use the standard rather than having to build our own agent or our own integration and this and that and the other then that gives you a lot more freedom as a vendor or as an open source project that wants to do observability stuff that gives you the freedom to not have to worry about how am I going to collect this data? How am I going to instrument all this these third-party libraries? It just says, hey, here's the data.

Let's go build build ways to make people's lives better with it. Love it. I didn't I didn't have you give them websites.

Can you give us the websites right? io light step. com.

com/cubecon, and that has a lot of links to demos and resources about what we're showing with uql for kubernetes applications. It's pretty exciting stuff actually Austin. Thank you so much man.

Thank you. It was great to be here Austin Parker. Light step opened Telemetry both here on techstrong TV.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a moment.