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Workshop: Observing and Understanding Distributed Systems With OpenTelemetry (Morning Session)

Location: Seacliff A

Duration: 9:00am - 12:00pm

Day of week: Thursday

Level: Intermediate

Prerequisites

  • Ability to read Go or Python code, and to debug/compile programs written in Go/Python.
  • Bringing own laptop
  • (Optional) Jaeger/Zipkin if participants don't want to use the instructors' backend
  • (Optional) Google Cloud account with billing account, Honeycomb.io account [we will supply these for participants missing these]

Modern systems architecture often splits functionality into microservices for adaptability and velocity. The challenge of managing infrastructure for microservices has led to the cloud native ecosystem, including Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC, and other projects. Observability, including application performance management (APM), is an essential component of a cloud-native stack. Without observability, application developers and operators cannot understand the behavior of their applications and ensure the reliability of those applications.  

OpenTelemetry (the successor to OpenCensus and OpenTracing) is a standardized library and specification that collects distributed traces and metrics from instrumented services. By instrumenting once with OpenTelemetry, developers and operators can understand how data and events flow through their applications through a variety of different visualization backends.  

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to instrument a distributed set of microservices for traceability using OpenTelemetry, and how to analyze your service’s traces using open source software backends like Jaeger/Zipkin. Finally, you’ll be able to leverage OpenTelemetry vendor-neutral flexibility to try out other tracing backends including the hosted SaaS products Stackdriver and Honeycomb, without recompiling. And you can go home feeling comfortable with implementing OpenTelemetry in your own applications, and being prepared to choose how you will store and visualize traces.

Speaker: Christine Yen

Cofounder @honeycombio

Christine delights in being a developer in a room full of ops folks. As a cofounder of Honeycomb.io, a startup with a new approach to debugging production systems, she cares deeply about bridging the gap between devs and ops with technological and cultural improvements. Before Honeycomb, she built out an analytics product at Parse (bought by Facebook) and wrote software at a few now-defunct startups.

Find Christine Yen at

Speaker page

Speaker: Austin Parker

Principal Developer Advocate @LightStepHQ

Austin Parker has been solving - and creating - problems with computers and technology for most of his life. He is an Open Source Engineer at LightStep and maintainer on the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects. His professional dream is to build a world where we're able to create and run more reliable software. In addition to his professional work, he's taught college classes, spoken about all things DevOps and Distributed Tracing, and even found time to start a podcast. Austin is also the co-author of the forthcoming book Distributed Tracing in Practice, available in early 2020 from O'Reilly Media.

Find Austin Parker at

Speaker page

2020 Tracks

  • The Future of APIs

    Web-based API continue to evolve. The track provides the what, how, and why of future APIs, including GraphQL, Backend for Frontend, gRPC, & ReST

  • Resurgence of Functional Programming

    What was once a paradigm shift in how we thought of programming languages is now main stream in nearly all modern languages. Hear how software shops are infusing concepts like pure functions and immutablity into their architectures and design choices.

  • Social Responsibility: Implications of Building Modern Software

    Software has an ever increasing impact on individuals and society. Understanding these implications helps build software that works for all users

  • Non-Technical Skills for Technical Folks

    To be an effective engineer, requires more than great coding skills. Learn the subtle arts of the tech lead, including empathy, communication, and organization.

  • Clientside: From WASM to Browser Applications

    Dive into some of the technologies that can be leveraged to ultimately deliver a more impactful interaction between the user and client.

  • Languages of Infra

    More than just Infrastructure as a Service, today we have libraries, languages, and platforms that help us define our infra. Languages of Infra explore languages and libraries being used today to build modern cloud native architectures.

  • Mechanical Sympathy: The Software/Hardware Divide

    Understanding the Hardware Makes You a Better Developer

  • Paths to Production: Deployment Pipelines as a Competitive Advantage

    Deployment pipelines allow us to push to production at ever increasing volume. Paths to production looks at how some of software's most well known shops continuous deliver code.

  • Java, The Platform

    Mobile, Micro, Modular: The platform continues to evolve and change. Discover how the platform continues to drive us forward.

  • Security for Engineers

    How to build secure, yet usable, systems from the engineer's perspective.

  • Modern Data Engineering

    The innovations necessary to build towards a fully automated decentralized data warehouse.

  • Machine Learning for the Software Engineer

    AI and machine learning are more approachable than ever. Discover how ML, deep learning, and other modern approaches are being used in practice by Software Engineers.

  • Inclusion & Diversity in Tech

    The road map to an inclusive and diverse tech organization. *Diversity & Inclusion defined as the inclusion of all individuals in an within tech, regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, race, age, sexual orientation, and physical or mental fitness.

  • Architectures You've Always Wondered About

    How do they do it? In QCon's marquee Architectures track, we learn what it takes to operate at large scale from well-known names in our industry. You will take away hard-earned architectural lessons on scalability, reliability, throughput, and performance.

  • Architecting for Confidence: Building Resilient Systems

    Your system will fail. Build systems with the confidence to know when they do and you won’t.

  • Remotely Productive: Remote Teams & Software

    More and more companies are moving to remote work. How do you build, work on, and lead teams remotely?

  • Operating Microservices

    Building and operating distributed systems is hard, and microservices are no different. Learn strategies for not just building a service but operating them at scale.

  • Distributed Systems for Developers

    Computer science in practice. An applied track that fuses together the human side of computer science with the technical choices that are made along the way

Schedule